Marketers and business owners often face confusion in choosing SEO or PPC in order to get more leads, increase conversions, and overall grow their business. Fortunately, this article covers up the pros and cons of both SEO and PPC to help you decide what’s best for your business.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website and webpages to rank in the organic results in search engines. In simple terms, SEO the process of improving your site with an objective to increase its visibility on SERPs for relevant searches. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention of your potential website visitors and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.
Why is SEO important for your business?
People conduct billions and trillions of searches every year. Most often these searches are made with commercial intent to find information about products and services. SEO helps your business here in presenting your website in the search results for the relevant keywords.
Search engines are often the primary source of digital traffic for business houses with their digital presence. A well developed digital marketing strategy not only helps in generating quality traffic and queries (leads) for your business but also complements your other marketing channels. High search engine ranking and a greater visibility than competition can have a material impact on your bottom line.
However, the search engines have evolved significantly over the past few years to give users more direct answers and desired information. This has eventually led to keeping the users the on the results page instead of driving them to the source websites.
Also please note that, features like rich results and Knowledge Panels in the search results can increase your website visibility and provide users added information about your company directly in the search results.
- Organic Traffic is Consistent
As long as you rank high on search engines, you can generate consistent traffic on your website. Even if your entire online marketing team is on leave, the traffic will still continue to flow.
- SEO is Budget Friendly
SEO is much cheaper in the long run than PPC. Though buying traffic is easy it always costs more than organic traffic.
Improves Brand
Downsides of SEO
- SEO Takes Time
According to Ahrefs, only 5.7% of pages rank in the top for at least one keyword within a year of publishing.
- SEO Requires Unique Content
When it comes to learning, sharing, and linking to content, people prefer to learn from reputed and reliable websites. In SEO, you may require to create original content yourself or hire someone to create for you. This can be too expensive and time-consuming for small-and-medium-sized businesses.
PPC or Pay Per Click
Pay-per-click is an advertising model where you pay for clicks to your website. It is related to search engine advertising like Google Ads.
It is a model of digital marketing where advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads in search results or web-pages is clicked. In other words, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits from organic searches with the help of SEO.
Search engine ads is one of the most sought out forms of PPC. Here advertisers can bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links. And when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering, your website appears in the search results. For example, if we bid on the keyword “Digital Marketing Agency in Delhi” our ad might show up in the very top spot on the Google results page.
Advantages of PPC
- PPC is fast
For SEO, you might need to wait for months to show its results. For PPC, you can head over to any ad platform and start a campaign right away.
- PPC Allows Segmented Targeting
With PPC, you can play around with different types of data and target people as you wish. You can also control and pay only for the people you want on your website.
- PPC allows for quick experimentation
With PPC, you can collect fast feedbacks as compared to SEO. You can set up a campaign, run A/B tests, and monitor the results to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Downsides of PPC
- PPC is expensive
If you’re in a competitive industry, PPC can get very expensive. Apart from the cost of placing ads, you will also have to pay for ad creation.
- PPC can lose effectiveness
You will have to constantly create new campaigns, copy, images, and refresh your existing ads in order to make them work in the long-term.
- You will have to invest to make money
You will need money to begin a PPC campaign. It is also likely that the first few months as you figure out how to optimize your campaigns, you will lose some money.
SEO vs PPC Which is better for my business?
Both SEO and PPC are legitimate sources of traffic but there are some situations where one channel may have more advantages than the other.
- If you have an innovative product
To get organic traffic, you will need to target keywords that people are already searching for, but if you have found a new company with an innovative product, chances are no one will look for it. In this situation, it might be better for you to leverage social media PPC to build awareness for your product before working on your SEO.
- If you are preparing for a launch of a product
If you are gearing up for a product launch or promoting a one-time event, you might want to consider using PPC. SEO takes time so your product might not get full attention during the launch.
- If you are trying to promote commercial content
People don’t want to visit commercial pages like landing pages. If you are looking for faster results, then consider using PPC as you can drive traffic directly to a landing page.
- If you’re building a site to sell later
If you wish to sell your site, you should maneuver the site in your favor using SEO. Buyers love SEO revised websites because you don’t have to monitor the campaign actively. Once you rank well in search engines, it often takes less work to manage compared to PPC.
Even after you know what’s best for you, you cannot declare one is better than the other. Both SEO and PPC bring you traffic though they are vastly different. The one thing that you should be doing is taking advantage and leveraging all marketing channels that work for your business.
