Search engine marketing and pay-per-click advertising (PPC) responsibilities involve launching, creating, managing and optimizing paid search campaigns. Critical thinking, problem solving and analysis play a significant role as this job requires reviewing data and creating reports. The reports provide needed information for tweaking campaigns in order to boost their usefulness. These jobs often need knowing how search marketing applications work.

SEM specialists research and choose the right keywords to optimize sites with, write ads that compel people to take action and conduct tests to determine campaign efficiency. People in this job optimize landing pages and use blog, email, social networks and online PR to create marketing campaigns with tall conversion and click-through rates (CTR). These jobs frequently have a greater analytical focus than SEO jobs.

Search engine optimization experts focus on scheming or modifying web sites to play nice with search engines and help the site show higher on the search engine results pages. They make sure the site doesn’t have any aspects that negatively affect its position with search engines. This career has overlaps with web design because civilizing a site’s ranking may call for making changes to the sites satisfied and structure.

It's important to know the differentiation between "black hat" and "white hat" tactics as well as the pros and cons of each. Using black hat strategies can hurt a company's standing in the search engine ranking positions (SERPs). Once a company loses its standing, it's very tough to climb back up. Rob Oskins of Capital solutions Bancorp explains that SEO experts have two key roles: ensuring the search engines can crawl your site's web pages simply by optimizing the site's content and structure, and getting links from other sites. "SEO involves these two main areas. It's not rocket science, but it's not easy," Oskins says.