It is certain that every businessman has heard the terms SEO and PPC at least once in the span of his career, and has asked himself how these can be advantageous to their business.
Before going in depth and comparing these two extremely beneficial forms of digital marketing, allow us to define the main difference between SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click). Although both are utilized in boosting traffic to a certain website, the biggest difference is that with PPC, you pay for traffic using advertising programs such as Google Ads and Yahoo Search Marketing. SEO, on the other hand, is a manner of building traffic for free by organically achieving high rankings in the natural search results.
Analyze your Goals
If you’re having a difficult time choosing between the two approaches with regard to which of them will benefit your business more, the first step is to analyze your business goals, needs, and budget. Deciding between these two strategies depends on what you want to accomplish for your business, whether it’s in relation to selling a new product or service, penetrating a large industry, or simply raising brand awareness and building brand loyalty among consumers.
Pay-per-click ads give your website top placement in the sponsored results section of each search engine’s results pages, depending on your chosen keyword and how competitive it is in the current market. Simply put, PPC is all about paying for advertising space on search results pages of engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Not only this, but you can also advertise your website on other sites that have a significant amount of traffic that fit your user demographics. This means that your ads will hit your targeted users every now and then to establish brand recurrence to possible consumers and in the end, ignite brand recall.
That said, using PPC is a great way to launch your business’ digital marketing efforts by bringing in immediate traffic, especially if your business is an emerging one. Despite your business’ being a new one, it is still helpful to start with small campaigns that are highly targeted to hit your audience, so that they can lead to significant returns on your initial investment.
Your Overall Industry
Another aspect to consider when using PPC is your overall industry range and how much your competitors are paying for ads. Average CPCs (cost per click) can range from US$2 to a costly US$30, depending on the main keywords or phrase you want to associate with your business. To check this, you can use a traffic estimator within the free Google external keyword research tool, which will tell you estimated competition levels as well as the number of advertisers bidding on your chosen keyword. If you’re just starting out with your business, CPCs will make it substantially more difficult for businessmen to get profit from PPC traffic.
If this is the case with your business and you’re not very willing to invest so much in website traffic, then SEO might be the better choice to explore. You don’t really need a big budget to advertise if you stick to free SEO efforts such as improving your page content, titles, backlinks, meta descriptions and other copy-related improvements. It’s vital to do some research to be able to apply the best search engine optimization techniques to the online handles of your business. If successfully done, the higher the chances are of your site being displayed on the top results pages more often. It might take some time to improve your content naturally, but rest assured that once you get there, the time and effort will be well worth it.
It is highly recommended for businesses to include SEO in their long-term marketing strategies since earning your presence organically with SEO through website and content optimization to rank higher in search results pages can say a lot about your brand. Gaining organic search visitors for your website directly informs your target market that you are a top service provider who’s credible and an important player in the industry. This will result in consumers trusting your brand, services, and products even more.
Consider Carefully
Despite this, one must keep in mind that SEO algorithms change from time to time, which can lead to businesses losing ranking overnight especially if you’re part of a competitive market. PPC, on the other hand, assures you of a stream of daily visitors. This is why it takes time to build page authority using SEO, since you can never really tell when your competitors are going to take over the search engine results.
Again, the choice between prioritizing PPC or SEO in businesses highly depends on what your company goals are, how much you’re willing to spend for traffic, and how fast you want traffic to go to your website. In using PPC ads, take note that it’s good to start with a minimum of $5 to $10 per day while it’s crucial to monitor content quality and management when it comes to SEO. If combined, the results can be ground-breaking. You can definitely get your business on the front page of search results depending on your keywords.
If you’re still undecided and you need professional assistance to boost your website ranking to the top, talk to us at NEO360!