SEO or PPC: Digital Marketing Strategy
“Which is better: SEO or PPC?” that’s the most common question we got asked. Quick answer: it depends on your objectives, current situation, and market.
New businesses can have difficulty getting acquainted with SEO, and if managed properly, paid search can provide a quick route to search marketing.
Your digital marketing strategy will be your basis in making decisions based on your current position. You need to understand your prospective customers, what they are looking for, how to get their attention, and how they use the internet. By doing this, you’ll have the data to decide whether you use organic search, paid search approach or even both.
Every business is unique. Your business situation is ever-changing thus changing and experimenting on an approach is a must.
In this post, we will discuss the pros and cons of SEO and PPC (pay-per-click) as a digital marketing approach and offer you some tips and recommendations based on your needs. We will also show you how to integrate PPC and SEO to your business strategy to improve your reach and establish your presence online.
SEO vs PPC
When considering whether to use SEO or PPC, there are two important differences. You’ll easily recognize a PPC or paid ad as it appears at the top of the page when you search for something while the organic listings from SEO are at the bottom.
The second difference is that organic traffic influenced by SEO is free, while PPC traffic has a cost for every click. In many instances, SEO and PPC work well when used strategically.
SEO: Improve your organic traffic
What are the advantages and disadvantages of search engine organic traffic? Let’s start on the advantages:
- Branding
- Awareness
- Credibility and trust
- Cost per click
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Cost
- Website traffic
- Sustainability
- Improved click-through rate (CTR)
- More clicks overall
- Strategic advantage
- Scope
Nonetheless, it’s not all pros and there are definitely drawbacks to SEO. Organic traffic from SEO can be slow to come through in certain situations and you may be massively outclassed by your competition.
If you’re just starting out and you’re targeting keywords that show results governed by goliaths like Amazon and eBay, you might need to change your approach.
You will need to build content resources too to obtain high organic exposure. Not all companies have the capital in-house to manage content development, and that can cause issues.
Professional help is most of the time required when looking for a secure and efficient link building strategy.
Another important thing to note is that the majority of users coming from organic traffic are merely looking for information (pre-purchase stage). Although still a valuable asset, these people aren’t ready to purchase yet and you’ll need to do more on your page to make them subscribe and purchase.
This is a pillar of digital marketing operation; however, it’s not always straightforward, and not a perfect fit for all businesses. Fortunately, there are a lot of guides all over the net on how you can improve SEO on your website.
PPC (pay-per-click)
So how is PPC different from SEO? Organic search is heavily favored and more sustainable then why would you consider PPC? Take a look at its benefits below:
- Improved ads
- Position on the page
- Visual product ads
- Budget
- Brand visibility
- Targeting
- Cost
- Speed
- Agile
- Marketing intelligence
- A/B testing
- Stability
As with organic search, paying search advertising offers many advantages. Nevertheless, there are also some risks to be wary of for advertisers. PPC can be costly.
It’s not always the case but it can add up costs fast. If you target whole countries or run global campaigns, those expenses could spiral.
As the name implies, paid search advertising is paid — so it requires significant spending. Quit paying the piper, and your ads are gone and your lead production is slipping away.
This shouldn’t be a bad thing as long as you have a decent purchase price, but contrary to SEO, it can sound like a terrible deal. Of course, to keep the opponents at a distance, SEO should be a continuing task but organic traffic can be a little more reliable.
Search advertising with PPC has a variety of choices, and making the right choices can affect performance here. New marketers can easily favor PPC over SEO with its fast result.
Keyword Bidding War
When you see product listings for your keywords dominate the page, then text advertising might not work so well. Similarly, if you place product advertisements and only text ads are delivered, then the products may not be distributed to those advertisements.
Going into bidding wars with other marketers isn’t rare, which can increase costs. When you start running your ads you also take a bite from the digital apple of some other marketers. This can also lead to rocketing costs.
Strategically, one can replicate PPC easily. If a competition learns that you are running ads, they will run ads and can mimic your wording. The rivals can easily examine the whole funnel. That’s the digital marketing environment and to some degree, you need to understand that.
Effective PPC requires professional monitoring and optimization — from bidding tracking, price ratings, positions, and CTRs.
SEO or PPC?
It is simply not practical to answer that question without considering the special situation of a given company.
With a small amount of spending or some custom SEO, a business with little competition and demand for just a few leads each week could likely develop good views search results (local and organic).
A new online store that competes with a results page from eBay, Amazon, and other large department stores and online shops is likely to have problems in organic search (at least initially).
A specific digital marketing plan and consistent short-term and long-term objectives are important when creating an SEO or PPC choice here.
SEO and PPC
They both have advantages and disadvantages and work brilliantly while synergistically helping one another. Where you get SEO and PPC to fit together, you often can achieve outcomes that are stronger than their individual parts.
The advantages of jointly managing the SEO and PPC involve:
- You can increase the total traffic volume by targeting clicks in organic and paid for high-performing keywords.
- PPC keyword and conversion data can be fed into SEO.
- Costly high-volume keywords can be moved to organic search from PPC
- Ad copy and landing pages A/B testing can be included in your landing pages and organic listing.
- Before working on a long-term SEO plan, you can test your keyword strategy in PPC
- Be visible in as many places as possible by using both strategies.
A unified search strategy that focuses on both SEO and PPC is the ideal approach in our practice with hundreds of companies. The outcomes are enhanced through the use of both organic and paid in each process. It won’t be perfect for every business but you’ll need to build a systematic search engine approach for high-growth, targeted marketing instead of looking at a single approach.
