PPC VS SEO – Benefits and Drawbacks
When talking about digital advertising, this question pops up almost 100% of the time! Clients often ask us if they should opt for PPC (pay per click advertising) or SEO (search engine optimization).
Of course, there is no easy, straightforward answer to this question so we’ll use this article to talk about each option and see where they should fit in in your overall internet marketing campaign.
PPC Advertising
As we already said, PPC stands for pay per click advertising and we usually talk about it in the concept of advertising on Google (using Adwords) or on social media (advertising on Facebook or Instagram). Of course, there are other platforms you can use to buy ads for your business, but these are the most popular ones.
The basic premise of this model is that you pay when someone clicks and lands on your website. And its main advantage is that it’s instant – as soon as you start your campaign, your website starts appearing on the platform.
The biggest drawback, on the other hand, is that the price can go up real quickly! So, before even thinking about going for paid ads, you need to make sure you have a system in place, a system that’s going to allow you to track each visitor and make sure if they convert or not, to make every dollar count.
SEO
Ulike PPC, SEO (search engine optimization) is a more long-term process of building up a client’s property and slowly improving its ranking in Google. Depending on the state of the client and the level of competition, this process can last anywhere from a few months to a year or two.
Though this may seem long, it pays off in the end as this traffic is of far better quality, compared to PPC and, in the long run, way cheaper.
But it can sometimes be difficult to explain to the client why they need to wait for so long before starting to get traffic. This is where most SEO specialists get stuck. How do you overcome this hurdle?
From our experience, and experience of some other seo specialists in raleigh area, the best thing you can do is be honest and transparent with your client, explain the benefits and drawbacks of each option and let them choose their own path.
In the next few paragraphs, we’re going to go over exactly that so stay tuned.
PPC VS SEO
We already covered the major difference between PPC and SEO which is time. But, let’s dive in and explore these in more depth.
Of course, PPC is instant, in the sense of getting clicks as soon as you start your campaign, but the opposite applies here as well – as soon as you stop paying for your campaign, your website disappears. In other words, there is no compounding effect, just immediate gains. SEO is at the opposite side of the spectrum since, as the time goes by, your website becomes stronger and stronger and once you reach the top (of Google), you tend to stay there. Even after you stop paying for the service, your website holds its ground and does not disappear into thin air.
The next big thing is the quality of the traffic. Even though both PPC and SEO function on the principle of keywords (you choose which keywords you target), the quality of the SEO traffic is much greater and much more statistically likely to convert.
Another difference is that with SEO you get more than you pay for, let me explain… With traditional PPC, you pay for a click on your ad and that’s it, the more keywords you target, more money will fly out of your pocket. It’s not like that with SEO… here you can target one keyword (though I prefer the word phrase) and in the process of ranking for it, you can actually start appearing for multiple variations of this keyword, or from some totally different, but still related keywords. This is because with SEO you are basically operating on a page level and, if built properly, one page will rank for many different keywords and bring in more traffic than you originally intended.
Conclusion
Though you might have noticed this article as being slightly biased towards SEO, this was not our intention. The truth of the matter is, both SEO and PPC have their roles and complement each other, rather than being rivals!
The best way forward would be to merge these strategies into one and start both SEO and PPC campaign so you can give your client that initial boost with paid ads, but still make sure they are getting the benefits of the long term compounding effect that the SEO provides.
