There has been debate over whether Search Engine Optimization is a better way to gain traffic to your website than Pay Per Click advertising. Both SEO and PPC have their advantages and disadvantages, but, depending on what your business is trying to market, you might be persuaded to use one or the other, or even both. They are both unique ways of trying to achieve the same goal: gaining the most visibility to your website and getting recognition to your business or brand name.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) includes numerous tasks involved with trying to achieve ranking within a search engine’s typical search results. SEO has many advantages, including that SEO can be done completely by yourself and you don’t have to pay anything to advertise your business. It can be a long process that can take a few months while trying to get your site to rank higher in search results, but it will hold value in the search engines. This is unlike PPC, where the paid link is only temporary and if you stop paying for the service, you won’t see the paid ad. Plus, the site might not even rank in the search engines, unless there’s an SEO campaign already going. Search Engine Optimization is often a more long-term investment, which consists of link building, keyword optimization, optimization of the data, blogging, etc. The listings within the search engine’s results are considered to be trustworthy, and the top three results in Google acquire around 75% of clicks.
Here are some things you may want to consider when trying to improve your organic results in a search engine:
- The cost of using an SEO company may be pricey, but it is better than using PPC where the pricing fluctuates based on the value of the keyword. You also have the option of doing it yourself, which might take a while to learn, but SEO is and operates on valuable information.
- There is considerable time that an SEO campaign can take to see the results in the search engines. Don’t get frustrated – this is a process, and you’re not going to see results right away. And, Pay Per Click will not affect your organic ranking, in general.
- Relevance of the keyword search can help people wanting to find the website that best fits the subjects they’re looking for. SEO provides 80% of trust in the organic search results of a search engine over PPC advertisements. Even other results have shown that 29% of users are irritated by paid advertisements.
Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing is a method of advertising on search engine result pages, and you’ve seen these listings as highlighted by a lilac (previously yellow) box at the top-right side of a Google search results page. Your website pays to have an advertisement either at the top or on the right, and you pay based on how many clicks you get from that advertisement. An advantage of PPC is that, as soon as you launch your campaign, it’s possible to see your advertisement on the search results right away. Therefore, PPC can deliver results fast, generating traffic almost immediately to your site. When you are trying to target a certain demographic, PPC can do that easier than SEO, in that you have the ability on social media sites to advertise to an age range, gender, income bracket, educational level, and even marital status, so that only those can view your ad. You are also able to promote offers that your business may temporarily have by paying for ads that only last for a few days, creating just the surge of traffic you need to sell your product. PPC is done based on keywords, similar to SEO, but the higher the value of those keywords, the more expensive each click will be for your business.
So here are some things you may want to consider before you start your PPC campaign:
- The price of the keywords constantly increases, as competition for keywords is high. The price also is always changing, as PPC is based on keyword offering price. This makes it quite difficult to set a budget for your PPC campaign – in fact, most of the time it’s impossible. Furthermore, 3 out of 4 advertisers are known as “click swindlers”. Click swindling consists of your competition pressing on your paid advertisement, purposely causing your business to pay a good amount of money for the advertising.
- Additionally, the relevance of your keyword is critical. Four out of five users of search engines have identified as never pressing on the paid advertisements. This is a discouraging statistic considering the degree of traffic you’re pursuing while paying for your advertisements.
Based on what we have discussed through this article, you can see the SEO and PPC both have their own advantages and disadvantages. If you combine these two methods, it makes for a very thorough online marketing campaign. PPC allows you to reach out to target audiences with keywords, and, once SEO is included and you start ranking, you will have a monopoly of keywords between both, although SEO can be more of a long-term campaign. This gives you more power to reach more of your market, which also increases trust in the brand, as repetition in seeing your site across search engines creates the impression that you must have something substantial to offer.