Starting a website and not sure what would benefit your business more between PPC and SEO? We’re here to break them down and find out which would fit better in your marketing plan.

“SEO vs PPC Which is better?” This question is often asked, but it carries no specific answer as it completely depends on your business’s objectives, current situation and marketplace.

Further in this article, we will talk about the pros and cons of both SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) as a marketing strategy, then we would check them out for specific situations and needs of your business to provide you with a complete picture of the difference between PPC and SEO.

Choosing SEO

SEO is all about ranking organically on search engine result pages(SERPs)

To rank better organically, one would have to understand different exercises and properties with which the website can be optimized up to the needs of Google.

Google have over 200 ranking factors to review on your site and decide whether you’re capable of ranking on top or not.

You’ve to keep optimizing your site to make it more balanced and attractive for both Google and the audience.

SEO is all about providing the best result to the audience and once you succeed in doing that, you can easily drive a considerable volume of traffic.

Now let’s crawl out the Pros and Cons of choosing SEO as your growth strategy.

Pros of SEO

SEO gives you a free organic audience, of course, the time and money are invested in doing SEO, but at least it does not cost you on each click, so once you maintain your SEO, every click on the website would be free.

Organic SEO without a doubt is the most cost-effective way to improvise your website’s visibility and can throw you upright in the arms of a potential customer who was searching for a business like yours.

With managed SEO, your business is at the table 24/7 for potential customers.

SEO provides you better stability, as good SEO would mean your site will rank good a long time.

With SEO you don’t have to target a particular page, whereas you can make many pages rank better on many keywords, which increases the area of target relative users.

By a survey done last year, it was found out that on average a website with organic SEO as a strategy attracts 10 times more audience than paid results.

Now let’s flip the coin and see what’s on the other side of SEO

Cons of SEO

SEO can take time, especially for new businesses or new domains, it can even take months to get the site’s SEO on the right path and make you rank on the top page.

In a competitive market, SEO can take both your time and money, as you’ve to practice many SEO exercises and for that, you would need many people, for which either you would hire new people or contact an agency.

SEO never ends, it’s an ongoing process, the SEO of your site would constantly need to get optimized, so you can’t leave it by doing once, you’ve to keep the process running forever.

SEO can be overwhelming, as Google makes hundreds of changes in its algorithm every year, you’ve to be updated always and keep optimizing your site according to that.

It gives you no guarantee, that even with all the efforts you would outrank your competitors, it’s an imperfect science, so you’ve to keep trying new things, but once it does it can provide you big numbers of profit. You can read this blog to know the difference between seo and sem.

Choosing PPC

PPC is all about paid advertising on search engines. Which usually go through Google Ads or Bing Ads.

In PPC, you simply put the money on board to rank on top, though it’s not this simple, it too has some factors which you’ve to clear up and you’ll be shown on top of the SERPs.

But where SEO works on free clicks, on PPC you’ve to pay for every click done on your ad.

But what still makes PPC a highly effective marketing channel?

Let’s find out the Pros and Cons of choosing PPC as your growth strategy.

Pros of PPC

PPC can provide you instant results, even the instant your PPC campaign goes live, you can see the traffic, clicks and conversions way faster than SEO.

PPC ads are always placed on the top of SERPs, so whenever a user searched a keyword that matches with your business, you’ll be shown first than any of the organic results.

With PPC you can enhance your business’s presence by adding phone numbers or expanded site links. Which provides you more opportunities to attract an audience.

While running PPC campaigns, you won’t need a bunch of people to work, you would just need a campaign runner specialist and a copywriter to write attractive ads.

PPC campaign gives you good enough data of people who clicked, made purchases, left and of those who didn’t return. Which can help you to analyze and optimize your running ad making it more favourable and attractive to the audience.

PPC allowed you to take a laser targeted approach with your campaign, it allows you to target people in a specific area, by the device they use or by precise timings, with which you can target the audience which you know would be more likely to be potential customers.

PPC allows you to rest your attention on Google algorithm changes, as you’re already be shown on the top of SERPs, you don’t have to pay much attention to the algorithm.

Cons of PPC

PPC advertising ain’t free. As audience generated from SEO came for free, whereas you need to pay for every click done on your ad. Less competitive areas could be a less costly per click, but in the case of highly competitive fields, the cost of every click could get getup $10.

Conversion rate becomes an important metric in the case of PPC campaigns, as if you don’t convert it doesn’t matter how many clicks you get, your money would be getting wasted.

As many new websites are starting with PPC campaigns, you would need to pay more money and more time to get better conversions.

Unlike SEO, here you would need a higher initial investment, as you will have to start with ad campaigns which would need a considerable amount of money to provide you with a good start.

Apart from the click costs, you would have to pay employees or agencies that you would hire to run campaigns.

The worst thing is, once you turn off PPC campaigns, your traffic stops. Your business has to enough grown that it can survive without PPC ads because you would be getting no traffic from there anymore. And continuing campaigns would mean continued expense.

Done with the pros and cons, now let’s get a one-on-one battle and find out the biggest differences between PPC and SEO.

One-on-one Comparison:

Ranking in SERP

SEO: To have to make your website fully SEO optimized and have to keep updating constantly to stay on the first page or top of the page. In SEO you have to take a constant eye on the on-site and off-site of your website.

PPC: In PPC you simply are shown on the top of the first page, but still there are some factors on which your ad appearance depends, including the keywords you target, keywords in your ad copy, keywords in your website’s landing page, and many more) and in some conditions, if the market is very competitive you would have to pay a higher cost per click (CPC).

Cost

SEO: As I’ve already told you that SEO traffic is free, it does not mean that you don’t have to pay anything for that. If you do SEO yourself or if you need to hire someone, just know that the competition on every keyword nowadays is high and it’s not easy to rank higher.

Now if you don’t know how to do SEO, you would need to hire freelancers or an agency to do that stuff, for which you have to pay.

So SEO is not directly money based, you can’t rank by giving more money, you’ve to put your time and efforts to rank successfully.

PPC: Now PPC does work directly, you pay them money and they show you on top, but still as we’ve already talked that it too depends on somethings which can vary its price.

The popularity of the keyword you use is a major factor, other than this it depends on the number of advertisers who want to use that keyword and the number of websites that already have an ad position for that keyword.

These factors can increase or decrease the cost per click on your ad.

Traffic potential

SEO: SEO can get you an amazing amount of traffic, if only you to get rank your website on the first page, you can get more traffic with a 24×7 continuous stream.

Also, SEO traffic is better as it’s organic so it creates more chances for the users to come back often to your website.

PPC: PPC can get you straight traffic from the top, they are more likely to be potential customers but the stream of audience stops just as you stop the campaign.

Also, the prices can be higher to show up on the first page because later than that the audience does not follow, you have to show up your ad on the first page for which you might have to pay enough.

Conversion

SEO: Organic traffic can be better in many other forms but in terms of conversion it lacks behind, as a page ranks based on many keywords and other factors, so it’s guaranteed that the audience was looking exactly for you.

PPC: Whereas in PPC, if you run a successful campaign based on exact keywords, you can get potential customers who are more likely to convert easily.

 As the clicks you get are from the audience that was looking exactly for your business, it provides higher chances to convert.

Ease of use

Neither SEO nor PPC is a piece of cake if you don’t have the required knowledge and experience.

SEO is a long process that can take months or years to rank, so you would need an experienced SEO expert to optimize your site to rank higher.

PPC is a bid on money, so you can’t risk it without the necessary knowledge, you would need a PPC expert to run your campaigns using the appropriate knowledge and experience or you will end up losing a considerable amount of money

Short term vs. long term

PPC: PPC is a 100m race, you would run fast, you would get clicks, fast leads, if managed properly, more visitors and more customers at the end of the day. But it’s not reliable in creating an online presence as it’s all in the fast lane, it will end up fast too. As soon as you stop your campaigns, you would find yourself right back from where you started.

SEO: Now SEO is a marathon, it’s a long term approach, it’s all about creating an impressive presence on the internet, you would have to go slow in this case and make your site user friendly, keep adding and editing content to tell Google that you’re a trustworthy blog and you’re not going anywhere.

Being Allies

We’ve found out what they can do for your business by themselves, now let’s find how that can help together to grow your business.

Many businesses follow a simple model of starting with PPC to gain traffic and potential audience and meanwhile, they optimize site and create a better SEO picture of their website in form of Google to keep growing and ranking so that PPC can be held back and SEO can be put out in front to carry on the rise.

Using SEO and PPC can bring out many benefits, including:

Keyword relevancy and the amount of conversion data can be used to grow SEO and organic search ranking.

The volume of traffic can get a high rise using both PPC and SEO tactics for high-performing keywords.

You can stay in front of people by using PPC and SEO from time to time, whenever the competition rises in SEO and ranking seems to go south, you can start a campaign to get more traffic and improve your SEO.

Testing a keyword strategy in PPC can help out in choosing a long term keyword strategy plan for SEO.

And many more.

The Bottom Line

In a nutshell, SEO and PPC both can be very helpful to grow your business to new heights individually. But using them together would be a smart turn to boost up the online presence of your business, using them together can help you make out a long term impressive online presence while getting a Convertable audience and sales.

If you still got any doubts about the difference between PPC and SEO or using them together, just know the comment box is open and we would love to answer your queries.

I hope you would have found it informative, thank you for reading.