What’s More Effective, PPC Or SEO?

Many new business owners often ask this question. Thing is, it doesn’t have to be either one or the other. Both have their benefits and drawbacks depending on the results you want to achieve. You could actually use a mix of both.

What is PPC (Pay-Per-Click)?

Pay Per Click is an online advertising model where you pay each time a user clicks on one of your online ads. Paid search ad is one of the most common types of PPC ads. The ads appear when users perform a search online using search engines especially when they are looking for something to buy. It could be anything from a mobile search (someone looking for “coffee shops near me” on their phone) to someone looking for a local service provider. These kinds of searches trigger pay per click ads. When you run PPC ads, you are only charged when someone cocks on your ad, that’s why it is called pay-per-click.

With PPC, you can budget and control your advertising costs. The trick is to know your target audience and what they are looking for. Ad slots are sold in an auction. You have to bid to show your ads on Search engine result pages. You would bid the maximum amount you want to pay for each click on the ad. You have the chance of ranking number one if you bid the most in the auction. Note that your bid amount is not the only factor that can affect your ranking, your quality score is also important. When someone clicks on your PPC ad, they are taken to your website and you will be charged an amount corresponding to your bid.

Why PPC Is Vital To Digital Marketing

PPC advertising can generate traffic for your site immediately. The principle is simple, bid high enough and get top placement and you will get the attention of many potential customers. If users search for the key phrases on which you bid and you’ve placed an enticing ad, you will get clicks as soon as the ad is activated.

1. Pay Per Click Advertising Is Fast

With Google Ads, you can generate huge targeted traffic within a short time of opening the account.

2. PPC Advertising Is Easily Adjustable

Many other forms of advertising takes weeks to adapt to changing audience behaviour but you can modify most pay per click campaign in hours or days. With this, you can quickly adjust to changing customer interests and market conditions.

The Challenges Of PPC Advertising

You could end up spending a lot of money when you get caught up in a bidding war over a particular keyword. The sad thing is that you may not get the returns you are expecting from that keyword. Bid inflation also occurs for highly searched phrases and this raises the pay-per-click cost.

There is also the problem of junk traffic. It can drastically affect the performance of your campaign. Most PPC providers spread their budget across several search engines and other sites thorough search partners and contents and content networks. It is good for your ads to be displayed on Google or other popular search engines but it is not good for your ads to show up and generate clicks from some deeper corners of the web. The huge traffic may look great in your statistics reports but you need to filter out campaigns from partner networks in order to carefully manage them and get the best out of your campaign.

If you want economy of scale, you won’t get it with PPC advertising. The more traffic you get, the more money you will pay in almost direct proportion to that traffic so your cost per click remains constant but your overall cost increases.

Let’s now look at SEO.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

SEO has to do with designing your website pages and contents with the intent of getting your website to show on the first page of search engine results. It must be on the first page for users to see it. This is what makes this technique tedious because you tend to write for the search engines instead of the people reading your pages. Search engines focus more on keywords, title tags, URL’s and backlinks. As tedious as this may be, it actually pays off in the long run by making your website easy for both searchers and search engines to find.

So if you compare it with PPC, SEO is a long process and you will not see the results immediately, but on the long term, you can get great and sustainable results. There is also the added benefit of getting residual income from posts you’ve made in the past.

You will get the best results from your SEO effort if you focus on long tail keywords. These words make you rank high on search engines. Note that more is not always better when ranking for a keyword or keyword phrase. Having any keywords can negatively affect you rather than help you.

You spend less for SEO. Organic listings are free in most cases because you do not need to pay for each click or allocate a budget for advertising. SEO continues to hold result over time. When you put in a little bit of effort and money, your website traffic will be consistent. You won’t need to pay a certain amount for every user that clicks on your ads and your traffic will not go to zero when it drops. With SEO you don’t need to place thousands of ads across the internet.

You also get better return on investment with SEO than normal ads. For instance, when you buy 2000 visitors from a paid ad, 4% of those visitors might convert into sales but when you get 2000 clicks from SEO, 8% of them will convert into sales giving you a better ROI. This is one of the benefits of SEO that you cannot get from any other form of marketing.

From the above descriptions of PPC and SEO you can see that you need to determine what you are trying to achieve to decide which technique will be the most effective for your purpose. Neither is better than the other, both are useful in their own way. You can even consider combining the two to achieve greater success in your marketing campaign.

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