SEO or PPC – If your looking to start your digital marketing journey, you are probably asking yourself the question ‘SEO or PPC – which one is best?’
Both strategies are fantastic areas of digital marketing and, as they’re both generally focused on getting to the top of Google and finding new clients looking for your products, it makes sense to compare the two.
Your exact business, budget and marketing strategy will determine which one is best for you!
In this article we’re going to take a look at the pros and cons of SEO and PPC, so you can see which is the best option for you and your website.
What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as it’s commonly known is a way of improving your website’s position in Google’s organic search engine results (SERPS).
What Are Organic Results?
Organic results are the results found between the paid ads at the top and bottom of each Google search engine result page.
The aim of SEO is to get you website as high as possible in Google to attract more high quality traffic to your website. It’s not always about getting lots of visitors to your website it’s about getting the right visitors for the right keywords.
SEO envolves a large range of different activities including off-site and on-site SEO. Search engines such as Google use hundreds of different factors to determine which website appears where in the search results.
What Is PPC
Pay Per Click or PPC is the method of advertising where you pay each time someone clicks one of your ads. Googles Platform is called Google Ads however it was formally called Google AdWords.
PPC ads in Google appear at both the top and bottom of each search engine results page (SERPS).
In the image below, the ads are the three top results with the bold AD next to them, below them are the organic results.
SEO vs PPC Which Is Best?
This is a very complex question as both are fantastic and offer a broad range of benefits. Let’s go through the positive and negative points of each.
SEO vs PPC: Pros and Cons
Lets start with SEO, the skill use to improve your positioning in the organic search results, there are a number of positive and negatives associated with this strategy.
Pros of SEO
Brand Awareness
One of the benefits of SEO is the exposure of your brand to new audiences. By working hard to ge keywords related to your products and services found on Google, you’re exposing your brand to new fresh audiences. This even applies if they’re at the top of your sales funnel and just looking for information. If you appear for their queries time after time, your audience will start to recognise and remember you, increasing your chance of a sale.
Authority and Trust
If you search Google for a brand and they don’t appear in the results, what does that say about them? It’s not good.
With strong positions in the organic results, you can dominate the search engine results pages which will reassure the person searching that you are who you say you are and a good company to buy from. By also appearing for commonly asked questions in your field, you can also build trust and credibility as an industry expert.
No direct costs
With SEO you don’t have to pay every time someone clicks to visit your website. But it’s not fair to say it’s completely free!
Improving your position in the organic search results takes time and effort from a professional SEO expert. This is going to cost you in a monthly retainer but it’s not costing you per click like you’ll be paying with PPC.
Cons of SEO
It Takes Time! As we’ve mentioned above, SEO is not an exact science, there are hundreds of factors Google use to rank a website. A good SEO campaign will help you to more effectively communicate to search engines that your website is the most relevant for a particular search term or phrase. But a lot of what Google look for is built on trust and, just as in real life, trust is built over time.
SEO can’t be ‘turned on’ and ‘turned off’. It’s a long-term strategy and something you should look as a long term investment and will take time to see good results.
Lack of control
By optimising your website and helping the Google bots crawl your website more effectively, understand your content and communicate your authority, you can help show how you appear in search engine results but unfortunately, you can’t directly control it. Ultimately, Google’s search engine will do what it wants.
Google are totally free to change your positions and the information that is displayed in the search results pages.
PPC: Pros and Cons
PPC is different to SEO and you have more control over what is shown in the search results but can end up costing a lot more.
Pros of PPC
Traceable costs
With the way Google Ads is setup, it is simpler than ever to trace exactly which keywords are generating sales and which aren’t. With the direct cost of ads, PPC makes it easy to keep an accurate track of your ROI for the overall campaign, AdGroup and keywords.
Full control
Unlike SEO, you have full control over your ads and how it shows in the SERPS. Not only that, you have control over when your ad appears and when it doesn’t. Want to turn of an advert turn it off, want to increase your daily budgets just increase them and the change is instant!
You can add extra features too like ‘click to call’, display your ratings and even countdown to the end of special offers.
Variety
It doesn’t stop at the text ads we looked at earlier.
There are lots of different types of PPC marketing and a variety of ads including display advertising, remarketing and social media advertising.
Ads like Google Shopping, which you might have seen when searching for a product you’re interested in, can display products right at the top of search results, allowing searchers to visit the product directly.
Instant
Unlike SEO which can take months to get keywords ranking on the first page of Google, you can set up your Google Ads account and be appearing in search results within a few hours. In the same way, you can increase or decrease your daily spend in an instant! If you have a time of year that you’d like to put more budget into your account you can or if you are quiet at certain times of the year you could decrease budgets or even stop your Ads altogether.
Visibility
The top ranking Google PPC ads appear right at the top of the page. No matter how great your SEO expert is, you won’t be appearing before the first set of ads, it’s just not possible.
Cons of PPC
Management
PPC accounts take time for management, monitoring and maintaining. Setting up a Google Ads account and just letting it run is a quick way to lose the all important control that PPC gives you and waste a lot of money. If you have been told Google Ads doesn’t work it’s probably because it hasn’t been managed properly. Without management not only will you miss profitable opportunities, you might lose tracking of your budgets, spending and ultimately ROI.
Complex Setup & Features
Running a Google Ad account to its full potential takes a lot of skill. There are some complex features you’ll want to take advantage of to really get the most of of your budgets. If you want to maximise your ROI and profits, you’ll need a skilled Google Ads professional working for you. It’s unlikely to be something you’ll want to work on yourself unless you have extensive Google Ads history.
So Which Should You Choose?
So if you ask us, in an ideal world, you’ll want to use both strategies together!
If you are looking for instant results then PPC can be a great option and can get you found instantly on Google and will have access to lots of data. For small to medium-sized businesses who have smaller budgets it has the added bonus of giving you full control of your spend.
ECommerce stores who are competing with large brands or competitors it allows your to instantly appear alongside them and compete with the major players.
For companies looking to get found for a large range of keywords and a large selection of products with a bigger ROI that don’t mind waiting a few months to see results SEO is the ultimate solution!
We recommend that you start a PPC campaign to see instant results which your SEO campaign is getting going. Although the intention of most companies is to eventually stop PPC once SEO is performing many decide to continue with both due to the high profits from both strategies..
If you need help in deciding which strategy to use for your website why not sign up for our FREE Website & Marketing Audit or contact one of our marketing experts to discuss your options.
