SEO VS PPC - Which Is Better For Your Business?

The world of digital marketing can be extremely competitive, and getting to the top of your prospective industries market can prove to be quite a challenge. The more businesses invest into their online presence, the more competitive and complex the market inevitably becomes, forcing you to adapt better strategies - and that’s where SEO vs PPC comes into play!

So what are these strategies and why should you care?

If you aren’t familiar with either of these terminologies, then here is a quick rundown of each:

SEO - Otherwise known as Search Engine Optimisation, it’s the process of optimizing your website and the content held within it to be as visible as possible for certain SERP (search engine results page) search terms. Through the use of keywords and LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords in your site's text and on page components, you can assign a high-level of relevance to terms that you want your business to show results for. This is a process that takes time and many other factors play a role in whether or not your business will actually rank, such as your domain authority and how many quality backlinks you have. A good SEO ranking outcome is one of the gold standards of digital marketing success.

PPC - PPC stands for Pay Per Click and that’s exactly what you do! Through Google Ads (otherwise known as AdWords) you can create customized advertisements that will show whenever an individual searches for one of your targeted keywords. The caveat here is that you are competing with your competitors via the use of bidding for clicks - so if you get outbid, then you show up lower on the SERP.

Now that we’ve covered the bare surface of each of these marketing tools, it’s time to have a more in-depth look into each and outline where their pro’s lie, and which you should consider adopting for your unique circumstances.

To start things off, let’s dive into SEO:

SEO is without a doubt one of the most successful internet marketing strategies that exist, but it is also one of the MOST competitive. To start seeing any real results (depending on the industry of course) can sometimes take months, but its all worth it in the end. Statistics have shown that leads gained via organic search results convert much more readily than those obtained from other forms of advertising. Users are also much more likely to skip the Google Ads at the top and the majority of traffic will find its way to the top five organic positions - pretty much dictating that if you don’t show up on the first results page, then you pretty much don’t exist at all. But that’s not all you can enjoy with a wholesome SEO strategy, here's what else you need to consider -

The Price - SEO campaigns usually take a long time before the results of all the hard work start to show, usually only after a couple of months. But that really shouldn't deter you, as the price that you pay is inevitably a lot cheaper than the other options out there. Though SEO is a long-term strategy, the gains you'll be receiving from the organic traffic will quickly illustrate it was worth the investment!

High Converting Leads - As we stated prior the leads that you gain from organic search results are a lot more likely to interact with your website and produce more conversions, but why would this be the case? Well, with a good SEO and keyword targeting plan, your website will only become visible to the people who really want/need your product or service. You only want your website to show for highly relevant search terms, and that’s what good SEO will provide. The second factor to consider is that people have a natural dislike towards advertisements of any sort and much prefer organic search results since they are more likely to contain content that is actually relevant to their query.

Consistently Drives Traffic - Once you’ve completely established yourself in the SEO landscape and your website shows up in the top fold of the first SERP, that’s when the magic really starts to happen. Traffic will inevitably begin to flow into your website and conversions will start to increase. Unlike SEO’s PPC cousin, these results will become the norm and these results won't end as long as you keep a healthy SEO plan in motion, whereas in PPC, once the campaign stops, so does the traffic.

Getting Ready For The Future - Getting to the top of the rankings sooner rather than later is incredibly important and it could help you stay in that position long into the future. Playing catch up is a serious disadvantage. Once you’re where you want to be; it’s easier to stay there and adopting a healthy ‘white hat’ SEO scheme will make sure you stay there even through Google’s turbulent algorithm updates.

And Now Let’s Delve Into Why You Might Need PPC:

Unlike SEO, PPC is a strategy that is used mostly for short-term gains but can be used for longer campaigns, depending on the budget of course. This form of advertising has a number of advantages over traditional SEO and these are:

Quick Account/Campaign Setup - The time it takes to create a Google AdWords Account, find your positive and negative keywords, write the ad copy and target the proper market is a process that can be done within 2 days. After that's done, the ads can go live and you can start to make conversions and drive traffic. The results are almost instantaneous, but don't forget, that these results usually don't come cheaply!

Quick Testing and Tracking - Along with the account and campaign setup, you get another pivotal advantage, and that's being able to test campaigns a lot faster and track how users use your landing pages from the advertisement that you've created. These two bits of information are extremely valuable to any digital marketer and can spell the difference between campaign success and failure.

Google SEO Algorithm Protection - Whenever Google brings out a new SEO  ranking algorithm update, many websites might experience a sudden drop in their ranking and that can have some serious negative side effects on their business. Adopting a PPC advertising campaign can prove invaluable during these times since their performance is completely separate from the algorithm, giving you some peace of mind.

In-Depth Market Targeting - The Google Ads platform thrives off the success of its user, and to aid in getting your campaign successful, they've included a range of market targeting tools to help you really hone in on a specific market, much more so that any SEO campaign can do.

So, what is the answer to the question of SEO vs PPC? Well, to put it bluntly, they both work in tandem perfectly! There is really no winner since, in essence, they perform different tasks.

Since SEO is a process that takes a long time, its advised that one supplement the waiting period with a series of highly targeted PPC campaigns to drive traffic, and once your SEO has taken a hold, you can use PPC to spot target certain markets for certain products/services that you supply. SEO should be seen as the general entry point for your website traffic where your customers find you, PPC is the hyper-specific targeted approach where you reach your customers.