SEO and PPC – Pros and Cons, Differences, Similarities

A common question that most of us have is whether to use SEO or PPC for our businesses. And this is not an easy question with a general answer and depends on many factors such as the business objective, marketing budget and the strategy, products and services etc. We are going to make it easier for you by providing all the required details about SEO and PPC, so you can make the decision by yourself.

What are SEO and PPC?

Before deciding on whether to use SEO or PPC, or to use both, or neither, you should have a clear understanding of what is SEO and PPC.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It simply means the process of improving your website to increase its organic visibility for relevant search queries. It means increase the organic page rank. This is long run campaign.  People make thousands of searches every day on search engines like Google and Bing, often with the intention of purchasing specific products and services. It is very important for your business website to appear among the top results for these searches in order to attract potential customers and to stand out from the competition and SEO allows you to do that. 

PPC stands for Pay Per Click advertising. This is a method of reaching your target audience by spending money. Company should have separate marketing budget for this. This will not bring organic traffic. Every time someone clicks on the ad it costs the advertiser money. PPC allows advertisers to bid for keywords and placements that are relevant to their businesses in order to reach their target audience. These both methods have advantages and disadvantages. 

Pros and Cons of PPC

Pros and Cons of SEO

Through the above analysis, it is clear that both SEO and PPC have positives and negatives. Businesses have to be smart enough to know when to use them and how to use them in a way to obtain the benefits of both.

What we have to understand is that both SEO and PPC are important for a business. SEO allows your website to improve in terms of both user and crawler experience, quality of content and quality and the number of visitors. Although this requires a significant amount of time and effort, having an SEO-friendly website does not only help you in terms of rankings but also the actual results such as user engagement and actual conversions. But there are many situations where the businesses cannot achieve the expected outcomes only through SEO, due to its limitations. Some of the example scenarios where we cannot use SEO are,

• • • • • Seasonal promotions or limited-time offers: SEO can not be achieved within a couple of days and there’s no guaranteed time period as to when a business can see the actual results of SEO. Therefore, it is very difficult for businesses to use SEO to promote their products, services and various seasonal offers that require quick results. On the other hand, PPC allows businesses to run campaigns only for a specific period of time and you can see actual results from these campaigns within a couple of hours.

• • • • • Showing customised messages: Through SEO, you cannot show different messages to different customer segments. However, in PPC, you can create different campaigns with different ads targeting different audience segments. PPC allows you to target audiences in terms of multiple options such as age, gender, location, income group and device. 

Now it should clear to you that both SEO and PPC should be a part of your digital marketing plan. Next, we will discuss how we can get the synergistic benefits of both SEO and PPC.

Increased search engine presence:

Both SEO and PPC increase the search engine presence for a website. SEO gives you the opportunity to rank on the first page or even the first place for a certain keyword. If you bid for the same keyword for PPC, there is a possibility for your search advertisement to appear on the top of the search engine results page. This ensures that your brand or the website dominates the search results and you have a better chance of capturing more visitors than the competitors.

Retargeting the previous visitors:

With the availability of many information sources, today the decision-making process of the consumer has become so complicated. We will assume that your website is performing really well in terms of SEO and attracting a reasonable amount of visitors to your website. But can you guarantee that all these visitors will convert to customers? No. Because there are hundreds of other businesses waiting to convince these customers to buy their products and services instead of yours. This is where remarketing comes into play. You can target the visitors who have already visited your website and show customised advertisements reminding them about your product or service through PPC.

Test new keywords:

It takes a significant amount of time and effort for SEO and still you cannot see the results immediately. It takes a long time to know whether the keywords that you have targeted through SEO are actually working or not. One method to test the viability of the keywords is PPC. Select a keyword that you think has the possibility of ranking on the first page and bid for that keyword through PPC. Monitor the performance of your website, the quality of the visitors and once you can confirm for sure that the keyword is actually working, you can target that keyword through SEO.

More data for decision making:

Another way that SEO and PPC can work together is by providing detailed information for smart decision-making. By combining the data that you get from SEO and PPC, you can gather more information about the performance of your website enabling you to make more accurate decisions.

Now you know why it is important to focus on both SEO and PPC through your digital marketing strategy. If you need any help with designing a digital marketing strategy that comprises both SEO and PPC, reach out to us. We are more than happy to help you to improve your website visibility in search engines and achieve the overall business goals through digital marketing tools.

We are equally excited about growing your business!

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