SEO vs PPC: Which is the Best Practice?
Are you confused about which marketing campaigns would be the best choice for your website? Well, you are not alone! Even professional marketers, with years of experience in ranking websites in the search engine, find it difficult to strike a perfect balance between SEO and PPC practices. The goal of both PPC and SEO is to get your website as high in search engine ranking as possible. However, both work in different ways and one method may deliver results faster than the other.
Webmasters recommend a combination of SEO and PPC to help your website secure a good ranking on Google, but which one should you focus on more and why? Let’s discuss each marketing technique in detail and its pros and cons. By the time you are done reading this post, you will know which marketing method is best for your digital business.
Let’s start with SEO!
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is known for bringing organic traffic to your website. Put simply, this method helps you grow your customer base by drawing the attention of your target audience to your website in the most generic and natural way. You don’t have to rely on the paid traffic for your sales. People will find your website when looking for similar services on Google.
For example, if you get your on-site and off-site SEO right, chances are Google will rank your website on the first page of the search results, thus increasing its exposure and visibility among your target audience. The main purpose of SEO is to suggest to the web spiders what your content is about so that these bots can rank your website higher than your competitor’s pages.
SEO optimization takes time. You can’t implement the SEO strategy and expect results overnight. It takes weeks and months for people to see the results. Consistency is the key to an effective SEO optimization strategy. You need to be consistent with your content, posting schedule, and technical SEO to drive organic traffic to your page and keep up your audience’s engagement. A few things included in the SEO are:
- Keyword optimization
- Readable and user-friendly content
- Posting blogs regularly
- Off-site SEO
- Speed optimization
Why Choose SEO?
SEO is the most cost-effective method of ranking a website. You don’t have to pay every time a user clicks on your website through the ad campaign. The only expense you bear with SEO is the fees of a digital marketing company like Digital Movers and your SEO specialist. Sometimes also building authority can cost you some budget when you invest in high authority backlinks for example. Your SEO will bring traffic to your website even when you have removed the PPC campaigns. In a nutshell, it generates long-lasting results.
The only issue with SEO is that it is comparatively slower than PPC. You are supposed to wait for months and spend plenty of time optimizing your content to get the best results. The more you work on your website’s SEO, the better it gets, and the higher your content will rank in the search engine.
Need help with your SEO optimizations? Our SEO specialists are always open to help you further!
2. PPC (Pay-Per-Click Advertising)
Pay-per-click advertising is the paid marketing technique, in which you buy visitors for your website. It is commonly considered forced traffic. As the name suggests, you have to pay every time a user gets on your website by clicking on the Google ad. You still need to optimize the ad for Google ranking by adding a proper title and using the right keywords in the advertisement copy.
Immediate-results
Setting up a new marketing campaign needs time, but it generates quick results. Plus, you don’t have to spend a lot of time researching keywords, optimizing content for search engines, and writing blog posts for competitor’s websites for backlinks.
You could prepare for your product launch, enjoy holidays, and focus on other crucial tasks while the PPC does its job. You could also combine the PPC with SEO to improve your website content as well as your website visibility. The major advantage to using a PPC campaign is that you will get immediate results, as Google starts displaying your website on the first page of the search results.
Easy to Rank
With a proper PPC plan in place, you don’t need to worry about the changes in the search engine algorithm affecting your website ranking. Your organic ranking or the type of content you are posting on the internet will hardly matter when you bid on the top spots.
Once you have invested in the Google paid campaigns, you can rest easy knowing that your website will secure a high rank in the search engine. When it comes to Google, you need to follow the best Google ranking practices. You don’t have to worry about Google penalizing your website for using the black hat SEO tactics.
Drawbacks
Now that you are getting the benefit of faster ranking, you will have to pay more to see the results. The more money you spend on PPC campaigns, the higher your website will rank. Once you stop running the PPC campaigns, you will stop receiving the paid traffic altogether.
PPC may seem less time-consuming than SEO, but you still have to spend time researching keywords, calculating returns, and handling the PPC effectively. You can do it yourself, but a vast majority of website owners hand the PPC campaigns to a specialist like Digital Movers for the best results. We are ranked as a Google Partner so this tells you at least that you have the right company on board. There is also a risk of click fraud, in which, some companies might use the fraud clicks that imitate the human clicks from multiple IP addresses across the world. As mentioned earlier, you stop getting leads once you stop the PPC campaign.
Need help with your PPC campaigns? Our advertising specialists are always open to help you further!
Which One Should You Choose?
The answer depends on your budget and preference. For some businesses, SEO alone work wonders if it is implemented the right way. For others, PPC is the only way to drive the audience to the website due to the competitive nature of the industry. In most cases, the digital marketing experts recommend the combined strategies – both SEO and PPC for the best results. If you have enough time, you could implement SEO. If you have limited time, you could deploy PPC campaigns along with SEO for immediate results.
Do you think you would like to hire a SEO and/or PPC specialist? Get in touch with us and we will show you the possibilities.