SEO vs. PPC – What Do You Choose?

Over the years I’ve gotten calls from hundreds of businesses and while most want SEO others are completely against paying per click.  But, why?

Most businesses start their own Adwords account and then try to run a campaign themselves without having any knowledge of bidding, ad copy, or keyword match types, on top of that they are usually not tracking anything. This is a recipe for failure.
I think this is the reason most develop an aversion to buying traffic, which is completely understandable. Even the most advanced PPC experts are going to have losing campaigns, not every one is going to be a winner, but the skilled person can make changes and create a winner as opposed to the novice whom doesn’t know how to turn it around.

Long and arduous debates continue to rage over whether businesses should do online organic SEO or engage in Pay-per-Click advertising. Each one has its place in the online marketing world, but the trick is to work out which is the best for your company. You have to take into consideration short- and long-term goals and the pros and cons of each. Generating business and new customers are your key objectives, and, of course, getting the right return on your investment. Well, SEO versus PPC, what do you choose?

First, What is SEO?

SEO consists of many activities, such as link building services, choosing the right keywords, developing effective meta and title tags and much more. It is important when you want a steady stream of traffic to your website while remaining in the top rankings of the search engines for a long time, and without paying for every click.

When you want to establish your business as an authority which will be recognized favorably by Google, SEO is the way to go. When you are not actually selling something online and gain revenue in a different manner through your website, SEO is also the best way to market.

Through SEO a business can rank their web page, their yelp review (or other profiles), and even video.  Being found on multiple platforms is crucial today for a well-rounded online presence.

In my opinion, SEO is still the best long-term ROI traffic strategy.

What is PPC?

Pay-per-click is where you buy an ad such as on Google with Adwords, and pay each time someone clicks on the link and goes to your website or a landing page. A specific landing page, built specific to the ad and a direct call to action, is the better way to run PPC.

The advertiser (you, the online business owner) chooses certain keywords that you feel your target audience will use to search for your product. When those keywords are typed into the Google search engine, your advertisement with link will show at the top of the page as a sponsored link. 

The more you pay for a click, the higher up you appear on the sponsored link section. Very popular words cost more than ones that are uncommon or more direct.

Pay-per-click is useful when there are only a couple of steps from the time someone clicks the link to when he or she can actually buy a service or product.

Okay! SEO vs PPC – Which Should I Choose? BOTH!

You should never focus on just one traffic strategy.  To build a stable online business you want to be getting traffic from multiple sources, if something was to happen to one you would still have traffic coming from others.

 

Secret Sauce: SEO and PPC compliment each other

Using PPC you can drive more traffic to a page faster!  This allows you to get DATA faster and thus make decisions and changes to your landing page so it will convert better.  You can be producing sales and improving your marketing message while your rankings are moving up, then when you hit the first page of the search results you have a page and message that is producing more customers.

PPC can also reveal the keywords that are converting the most on your offer, then you can optimize for those keywords to rank them organically.

As you start getting more organic traffic you can then decrease your ad spend (if you want to) or keep it going.  Why settle for one spot on the first page when you can have 2 or more.

The more you are seen the more your customers will become familiar with your name and the greater chance of them buying from you.

Then after 6 months or a year of SEO (depending on your niche), your organic traffic continuous growing and thus your SEO has more than paid for itself, in free traffic (without cost per click).

With SEO you get more permanent results. When you run out of advertising money, the PPC campaign ends, but your website links built through SEO companies that are there for good. Additionally, it has been noted recently that the majority of clicks happen in the organic results.  Now, get those ads running and start optimizing!