Both PPC and SEO strategies are effective strategies to increase your website traffic. Depending on your goals, there may be one better option for your business or even a combination of the two, So which one is better for you to implement ..SEO OR PPC? Before you waste advertising dollars on a campaign, It’s important to know which one is suitable for your business
Pay-per-click PPC is a short-term digital marketing strategy in which advertisers have to pay a fixed fee each time online users click on one of their ads. These ads bring online traffic to your site using relevant keywords. A particular PPC campaign requires detailed research on the keywords your target audience searches for relative to your industry. However, you will need to create a compelling landing page to convert your leads into customers.
Search engine optimization SEO is a long-term digital marketing strategy that helps you build traffic to your site for free by increasing your visibility for search engines. What SEO does for your website is that it makes the look of your site valuable to popular search engines. However, it is a long-term process and requires great patience to obtain viable results. Although you will not be able to rank your site overnight with SEO, it is cost-effective and very beneficial in the long run.
The key difference between these two strategies is that the traffic you generate from PPC will cost you money, while the online traffic from SEO is organic and free. You can often come across the words “paid search engine listings” or “paid advertising and organic search engine listings” for these two digital advertising schemes. Both of these words basically depict the same thing.
There are many ways to be searched in Google search. However, there are two particular ways that are being explored in more depth below:
Organic Search
Natural or organic search is most likely how customers are currently searching for your business on Google. These results fall directly below the paid results (usually the top 2-3 results). These results are constantly changing based on Google’s search algorithm. Your Google ranking includes several factors, including:
- Your website content
- Age of your domain
- Number of inbound links pointing to your website
- The types of keywords you target in your on-site optimization
It is not possible to rank in organic search by just a keyword. It can be a more complex process for national terms because the competition for these keywords, and the amount of traffic they generate, is relatively high. It is entirely possible that you cannot break the top 10 pages for national tenure even after a few months. Recently, Google has even been using your stored cookies to target your location for keywords automatically. This requires marketers to be fluent in targeted keyword ranking factors locally and nationally.
During your SEO campaign, you will build rankings for many different keywords that can bring results to your website for a very long time, especially if you do not have a lot of local competition for the same set of keywords.
Paid Search (PPC)
Paid search advertising is not new on the Internet and is one of many paid advertisements on the web. However, it is one of the most used and economical methods of advertising on the web and brings many advantages that are not associated with organic search.
To get started, you’ll need to set up an AdWords account with Google, where you’ll handle all your account settings, from writing ads, setting links, managing your ad bids, daily budget, and more. This is your central dashboard for all your advertising with Google, so you must understand exactly how everything works, so you don’t accidentally set a budget or inadvertently cancel a campaign.
The most important benefit of choosing paid search over organic search is the immediate benefit of having your ads’ pop-up’ in Google search. After the initial setup, your ads can start appearing quickly within a few hours of you starting the campaign. This allows for immediate results. However, when you stop paying for ads on Google, you will not appear in the paid results.
SEO or PPC?
It’s not possible to answer this question without considering the unique situation of a given business.
A hyper-local business with little competition and requiring just a few leads per week can develop good visibility into local and organic search results with little expense or some DIY SEO.
A new e-commerce store competing with a page of results from Amazon, eBay, and other major department stores and online retailers will likely struggle in organic search (at least in the short term).
SEO and PPC
In an ideal world, we would see both SEO and PPC. They both have pros and cons and work best while supporting each other. Where you can make SEO and PPC work together, you will often be able to drive results that exceed their constituent parts.
The benefits of running SEO and PPC together include:
- Keywords and data conversion from PPC can be fed into (SEO).
- The total volume of online traffic can be increased by targeting clicks in paid and organic for high-performing keywords.
- High-cost keywords, high-volume or low-conversion keywords can be transferred from PPC to organic search.
- A/B testing of ad copy and landing pages can be fed into your organic listings and landing pages.
- Remarketing allows you to stay in front of visitors after the initial touch through organic search and optimize the message around their engagement with your site.
- Test your keyword strategy in PPC before jumping into long-term SEO strategies.
- Target users at all stages of the customer journey from research to comparison with business keywords.
- Increase confidence and awareness by having both strong organic and paid visibility.
When you decide between PPC vs. SEO to generate traffic to your business, you have to think about long-term and short-term results. PPC is going to give you fast results, but you have to keep paying for it. SEO takes some time, but it is more reliable from the consumer perspective and will give you long-term benefits. So if you are trying to rank for a service or a short-term deal, PPC is the way to go. However, if you are looking for a more important route to build traffic, choose the SEO route. And while you are waiting for your SEO efforts to click and start getting results, you can go toward the PPC route to appear in search engines as an advertisement quickly.
Benefits of SEO
Let’s have a look at the benefits of SEO:
Awareness: Visibility in search engines for your targeted keywords puts your business in front of potential customers in the same way you wanted to advertise. It increases brand awareness.
Branding: Positive branding can benefit from visibility about business search terms and informational queries related to your business area. Your brand can become affiliated and credible with searchers who ask questions as they conduct research that will lead to purchase. You can become an authoritative voice around a given topic.
Credibility and trust: Bringing your site back to organic results can affect your perceived credibility with the audience seeking your services. Many users skip advertisements and rely more on organic results. Being visible gives your business all the essential pieces of acceptance. Also, having solid reviews and signs of reputation will provide further benefits.
Website traffic: Increasing website traffic gives you more opportunities to raise awareness of your business and educate a prospect about why they will buy from you.
Cost per click: Organic search makes traffic-free. It will take time and effort to develop that visibility, but there is no direct charge for each impression or click.
Return on Investment (ROI): Organic search engine traffic can provide better ROI over traditional forms of paid media and can undoubtedly improve PPC.
Cost: While SEO is neither cheap nor easy, it will generally be more cost-effective than all other marketing tactics to provide brand awareness and relevant traffic to your website.
Stability: Unlike paid search marketing, organic traffic does not dry out the moment you pay. As such, efforts to develop organic traffic can sustain a business when marketing expenses are cut.
Better click-through rate (CTR): A more significant percentage of users click on organic results. While there are exceptions to this rule, you will generate more clicks from a highly ranked organic list than a highly placed ad.
Benefits of PPC
How does paid search differ from organic search? Some benefits of PPC are as follows:
Position on the page: Paid search dominates top-down content. Typically with four ads on desktop and three on mobile, a user will always see paid search ads, even if they choose to scroll through them.
Better advertising: PPC advertising is just that advertising. Like, you have far more granular control and more space to deliver your marketing message. There are some options for creating advertisements that make calls, locations, site links, pricing, and bullet point (callout) pages.
Visual product advertising: Where you sell products, Google offers a choice of visual shopping ads (Product Listing Ads, or PLAs) that can help a user see what they will click. Such advertisements can actually improve click-through rates by offering a feature not available in organic search.
Brand visibility: Running paid search ads gets easily noticed by the right people. Even if they conduct a brand search before clicking to your site, this visibility will pay your marketing dividends.
Budget: PPC allows budgets to be controlled. Determine how much you are willing to spend per day (ideally with some initial and ideal views of returns), and set that fixed limit.
Targeting: PPC provides a laser-targeted way to get in front of potential customers. Ads can be targeted by search keywords, time of day, day of the week, geography, language, equipment, and audience based on past visits. In comparison, organic traffic is far more scattershot.
Speed: While it may take time to develop good organic visibility, PPC campaigns can be built in days and run for weeks. There is no quicker way to get in front of customers at the exact moment of ready-to-buy than paid search engine advertising.
Agile: Speed provides agility. Want to test a new product? A New Marketing Message? By running a small PPC advertising campaign, you can get rapid feedback on new product launches (or minimally viable products).
Market understanding: Where Organic hides keyword data mainly in the name of privacy, there is no such restriction with paid search. With conversion tracking and solid integration with analytics software (such as Google Analytics), you can determine how many and what keywords convert at a percentage and cost. This intelligence can be directly fed into organic search (SEO) marketing and can inform all other advertising to improve results across the board.
A / B test. Easily segmented ads, landing pages, and even call-to-action buttons to determine where the best results lie. Then, this information can be fed back into all other digital (and traditional) marketing efforts.
Stability: AdWords does not suffer the same turbulence as what organic consequences can suffer. Changes occur, but they have minimal effect and easily can be managed. Careful use of match types and analysis of search term reports allows the removal of junk search over time and increases ROI.
Cost: Many advertisers believe that a PPC account can be a low-cost way to generate leads for your business. If you are a local business targeting a small geographic area and a small set of keywords, PPC can work quite well for you if you have the right settings and budget for a PPC campaign.