Digital marketing has become central to building a brand that delivers bottom-line results. However, as digital marketing techniques rapidly evolve, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the variety of approaches to attracting customers online. There’s one question many business owners frequently grapple with. Should they be allocating their marketing budget to PPC or SEO?
In this article, we break down the key differences between SEO and PPC. We then evaluate their respective pros and cons, and explain how you can leverage both to build a highly visible, profitable brand.
Why Are PPC and SEO Services Important?
In today’s marketing landscape, your business’s online presence is everything. Key to establishing this presence is ensuring you are driving traffic to your website. If your website isn’t visible to your customer base, it’s unlikely you’ll achieve the traffic necessary to be profitable.
A critical factor that determines your website traffic volume is where your website ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs.) In other words: how high up on the results page your website appears. This is where both PPC (pay per click) and SEO (search engine optimization) come into the picture.
PPC and SEO: The Basics
On a typical SERP, you’ll find premium ads listed at the very top of the page (often indicated by the word ‘sponsored’ or ‘ad’). These ads are PPC advertising. As you scroll, you’ll find organic search results. These search results earn their position on the SERP not by being paid for directly, but by employing techniques designed to manipulate the algorithm into ranking any given page more highly.
SEO essentially involves creating content for your website, optimizing your website, optimizing your google business profile, and creating high-quality backlinks to your website. It is a combination of all of these that will result in your website ranking higher on SERPs, while also providing helpful, relevant information to prospective consumers.
Search engines use complex algorithms to ‘read’ and rank web pages based on several factors. Some of these are public, and others remain unknown. Effective SEO services rely on what is known about search engine algorithms to ensure content ranks higher on SERPs. For example, one effective SEO technique relies on placing certain keywords that are commonly searched by your target audience (e.g. ‘best backpack’ or ‘Miami plumbing services’) in well-written, informative blog content on your website.
PPC is where businesses pay for their ads to appear in a position against a specific searched for term. When a consumer clicks the ad, the business must pay the search engine the amount, based on its bid, that won the auction to determine that position. If you search ‘best backpack’, your results will likely all be paid-for ads that take you to online retail stores.
The Pros and Cons Of Using SEO Services
Deciding whether to allocate more of your marketing spend to SEO or PPC services is difficult. It’s helpful to delve a little deeper into each to tease out their advantages and disadvantages. Let’s start with SEO. Its specific advantages include:
- Cost. SEO is typically lower in cost compared to PCC, and there is little risk of a dramatic increase in cost because SEO services do not rely on bidding.
- Sustainability of results. Another major advantage of SEO is you don’t need to constantly spend on ads to maintain your website’s visibility. Once your website and blog content have been created, it will continue to bring organic traffic to your website as long as the keywords remain relevant and you keep creating original, informative, high quality content. Organic traffic tends to last and is also easier to optimize and sustain once a high-ranking position has been achieved.
- Credibility and trust. One of the best things about SEO is it simultaneously builds and enhances the credibility of your brand. Many web users are suspicious of paid-for ads and view organic search results as more trustworthy. When they click on an organic search result that directs to your business’s page filled with useful, authentic content, your brand’s credibility is greatly bolstered.
- Improved website. A great by-product of SEO techniques is that you end up investing in your website over the long term, creating helpful, accessible, informative content that will always be there for users to return to.
Unfortunately, SEO also comes with its downsides. Some of the most notable are:
- Lack of immediate results. It can take several months to see concrete results from SEO, particularly if your search terms and keywords are competitive. You may need to experiment with several keywords and techniques to see what works best.
- Effort and expertise. A sophisticated SEO strategy requires time, skill, and technical expertise to implement. You need to have a deep understanding of search engines and the factors on which their algorithms are based. While it’s possible to learn the ropes yourself, you’ll likely need an experienced SEO services provider to create and implement a SEO strategy for your business.
- Upkeep and vulnerability to algorithm changes. An effective SEO strategy can be quickly disrupted if a search engine updates its algorithms (as Google frequently does). Your SEO strategy will need to be routinely updated to sustain rankings, and may need a significant overhaul if it responds poorly to an algorithm change.
The Pros And Cons Of PPC Services
PPC ad campaigns have become an increasingly popular way to directly target consumers and generate leads. Some of PPC’s major advantages are:
- High visibility. PPC ads will give your business high visibility, as they’ll appear at the very top of SERPs. This gives you greater certainty that your ads will boost traffic and lead to increased sales.
- Immediate results. Unlike SEO, you will be able to see the results of a PPC ad campaign almost immediately. Once you’ve set up your campaign and outbid your competitors, your ad will immediately rank highly on SERPs. This also means that you can easily experiment with what works best, without revising an entire suite of content.
- Control and scalability. With PPC campaigns, you’re not susceptible to the whims of the algorithm. It’s also easier to scale your ad campaigns by setting a higher ad budget and running multiple ads at once. It’s much harder to scale an SEO strategy.
- Highly targeted. PPC services allow you to develop highly targeted ads that address your audience through personalized messaging that speaks to their geographic region, interests, demographic profile, online behaviors and more. There are several ways to target ads other than just keywords, which means better visibility to the right audiences.
As with SEO, PPC also comes with a range of disadvantages that can compromise its effectiveness for your business. Some include:
- Expense. PPC advertising can be very costly when compared to SEO as you are paying per click, and this expense can quickly add up.
- Highly competitive. In certain industries where specific search terms attract a lot of competition from larger companies, bidding wars can easily develop, rapidly increasing ad costs. If you’re unable to keep up, your PPC campaign will be rendered ineffective.
- Lack of longevity. As soon as your PPC ad budget has been depleted, your ad will be pulled from its ranking position, and traffic to your website will drop significantly. Unlike SEO, PPC does not build stable visibility and presence over time.
- Little contribution to brand presence. PPC campaigns don’t require as much investment in your website, and they can sometimes end up harming your brand credibility in the eyes of consumers who are distrustful of paid ads.
Leveraging PPC and SEO For Success
With clear pros and cons with respect to both PPC and SEO, deciding which approach to use can be very difficult. Thankfully, understanding the distinctive advantage that each approach provides allows you to craft a balanced online marketing strategy that leverages the best of both PPC and SEO.
One way to achieve this blended approach in practice is to use SEO services as part of your longer-term profile-raising strategy, incorporating SEO techniques into your overall brand awareness efforts and website visibility. You can then run highly targeted PPC campaigns for short periods linked to specific timelines or events (for example, in the lead up to Thanksgiving, before a change in seasons, when launching a new product, or when running one-time offers).
It’s also a good idea to focus on SEO if you’re a smaller business with a niche product or service. Rather focus on slowly establishing your brand authority with informational content and website credibility than spend thousands on a short-lived PPC ad campaign.
