If you own a business, you have probably been faced with the same question: ‘Is PPC or SEO marketing more effective for my business?’ Depending on your business, this can be a difficult question to answer, and it depends on how quickly you want results and what quality of results you ultimately want.
With PPC, you could buy yourself some leads but spend a lot of money securing quality leads. Conversely, you could invest a lot of time in boosting your SEO ranking for more qualified leads, but it will be a slower process.
Before deciding which may be better for your business, let our PPC and SEO agency go through the pros and cons of both to give you a better foot to stand on in the ever-changing digital marketing game.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is concerned with improving your ranking on the search results of search engines such as Google. The closer you are to the top of the search results for your preferred keywords, the more likely users will click on your website, and from there, the rest is up to your website to get a sale, signup or complete some type of goal.
SEO is seen as ‘organic’ lead generation, meaning that you cannot pay for your position at the top of your search results. To get higher rankings, you need to abide by certain criteria that Google likes and will, therefore, rank you higher. The criteria are focused on ensuring that your website is as relevant for your chosen keywords as possible. If Google deems you to be the most authoritative on a specific topic, you will be placed at the top of the search results. Your website needs to also be user-friendly, ie. it loads fast, is mobile friendly and is easy to navigate.
Let’s take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of using SEO in your digital marketing strategy.
Advantages Of SEO
- SEO helps to build consistent results.
- SEO helps to build quality leads that can turn into loyal customers.
- More cost-effective than Pay Per Click advertising, where you have to pay for every click on your site.
- Results are long-lasting, ie. you can remain in a high position in the search results for longer.
- It helps to build an authoritative site to eventually dominate your market.
Disadvantages Of SEO
- To build a fully optimised, authoritative site is a slow process and slow to see results compared to PPC, where the results are almost instantaneous.
- SEO is an ongoing process due to the constant updates and requirements from Google. Meaning your site will never be fully optimised, you will have to keep working on it.
- SEO is a time-consuming process.
- Traffic cannot be as targeted as paid search.
- Properly optimising your website can be confusing and may need the help of an SEO agency to get you set.
PPC
PPC stands for ‘pay-per-click’ advertising, and it is concerned with bidding for the top spot in the ‘sponsored’ results of Google or the top 3 ‘blue’ ads that you see when you search for a specific keyword. Once you start paying on popular PPC platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads or Bing Ads, the results will be almost immediate.
Certain platforms like Google Ads still have specific criteria that you need to follow in order to beat out your competition in the paid search field. One such criterion that Google values is your quality score. To increase your quality score, you need to make sure your Google Ads campaign is well organised with relevant ads for relevant keywords for your business. This means that your website and your ads should be saying the same things; therefore, when people click on your ads, they get exactly what they are looking for. The more specific you are, the better! This is where a PPC or SEO agency can help!
Advantages Of PPC
- Your results will be immediate and more traffic is guaranteed. This is perfect for the launch of new products.
- You are in control of your PPC campaign. This means you can control your budget, increasing it when you want to and pausing the entire campaign when you need.
- You are able to target your traffic more effectively. With PPC, you can target specific areas, groups of people and even remarket to previous customers or visitors.
- PPC is great for a website that cannot be optimised for SEO, ie. it isn’t a content-rich website
- When there is already a lot of competition in the SEO field in the top 3 spots, then PPC can help get a piece of the traffic by bidding for top spots above the organic results.
Disadvantages Of PPC
- You have to pay for good results and pay even more for the top positions.
- If your budget dries up and you have to pause your campaign, then all your traffic dies too.
- Keyword research can be time-consuming, and if the keywords chosen are too broad, it can cost you a lot of wasted clicks and budget. This is where a PPC or SEO agency would come in to help.
- Since your competitors can see that you are vying for the top spot of specific keywords, they can use different ways to waste your budget by clicking on your ads. This is called click fraud.
Why You Should Use Both…
Since both SEO and PPC marketing have great advantages and are used to target different market interests, it would be wise to invest in both. Since PPC can get you fast results and you are paying for clicks, you can target more buyer-intent keywords, therefore targeting users that are looking to buy something like your product or service. Then you can use SEO to target the rest of the market that are either gathering information, are interested or are unaware of your product/service. Therefore, you would focus on creating quality content around more informational keywords with the hope of turning curious visitors into customers.
Both PPC and SEO have their place in your digital marketing strategy; you just need to find the right PPC and SEO agency to start increasing your visitors and your leads. At The Weblab, we are experts when it comes to PPC and SEO strategies, and we can find the perfect balance of both to suit your business. Give us a call today to find out more about our PPC and SEO services!
