SEO Vs PPC: Which is better for your business?

SEO Vs PPC

It's a hardcore topic to discuss. In simple terms, it's nothing but whether you can stay unpaid vs. paid traffic. Don't you feel astonished? That's what exactly is implicit!

Any successful marketing plan involves an ample amount of time and money. Selecting Search engine optimization vs. Pay per click depends on the strategy of how you opt for our business.

Search Engine Optimization | SEO

A good SEO strategy will take time, but it's worth investing in. It helps for everlasting growth organically. Good SEO practices make you consistently rank ahead of your competitors in the long run. 

Pay-Per-Click | PPC

Google Ads or Adwords, where you create PPC campaigns in Adwords account. PPC helps to appear over your competitor's organic content in SERPs. A vast amount of cost and time involved in this process.

Some of the other forms of advertising under paid advertisements are display advertising, banner ads, and remarketing strategies.

Table of Index

• What's the critical difference between PPC and SEO?
• SEO Or PPC: Which suites better for your business?
• What is the ROI difference in both SEO and PPC?
• What is meant by PPC?
• Merits and Demerits of PPC
• What is meant by SEO?
• Merits and Demerits of SEO
• Mistakes to avoid in both SEO and PPC

What's the critical difference between PPC and SEO?

PPC shows your page content on foot and top of the search engine pages ahead of your competitors by paying to Google. SEO, in simple term, it is free and organic. 

Organic Growth

Search Engine Optimization is apt if you prefer longstanding organic growth. It's free, except for your time.

Paid Traffic

Google start charging us neither for impressions nor for clicks. It starts the moment when the ad goes live. You can see your web page or landing page on top of search engine rankings over the organic results.

Basic Elements of SEO

Here, please find the list of essential elements of SEO. 

On-page SEO includes

• Title tag where you can keep well-optimized keywords
• Use meta descriptions with relevant keywords on the user search intent
• Utilize Alt text behind the images, where you have keywords in descriptive.
• Place keywords in the content without stuffing
• Using subheading tags such as H1, H2, H3, H4 with keywords.

Off-Page SEO includes

• Backlinks show the proof to search engines of how far the trust and integrity of the website works. High-quality content with high domain authority backlinks from domain extensions such as .EDU, .GOV can help to boost your ranking immediately in search engine ranking pages.
• Social media marketing activities will boost the ranking based on sharing the content, likes, comments, mentions, tweets, etc. It also depends on how you actively engaged with social media pages respectively.
• Guest blogging from high authority sites
• Influencer marketing 
• Submission to business directories with post and review etc.,
• Press Releases
• Internal Link Building to help the user with proper navigation inside the website
• User-Generated content such as rating and reviews on trustworthy increases the mileage on boosting SERP's

Basic elements of PPC

Whenever a user clicks on an ad link, you need to pay the bid amount suggested by Google, where you have targeted a particular keyword.

PPC ads are placed either on the top or the bottom of the search engine ranking pages. In the middle, organic results are available. 

Display ad and remarketing are specifically in the e-commerce industry to display the product and enforce the user to purchase the product once the user left the payment page with the help of remarketing.

By the way, if you opt for immediate results, PPC would be the better suggestion. SEO is a waiting game for longstanding growth.

SEO Or PPC: Which suites better for your business?

It depends on your business requirements.

• Are you looking to generate leads for your business?
• Do you want to plan your strategy on paid or free traffic?
• If paid, what's your tentative budget?
• What is your expected domain authority with the entire process?
• How are your competitors rank on search engine ranking pages?

List down such queries before planning the get to the next step of action. If you own a small business, doesn't have sufficient budget on ad spend, leverage on 

SEO strategy to attain higher visibility in local listing and organic search results. SEO will be a better option for longstanding constant results.

If you own an eCommerce website, are looking to list products or services, outrank all your organic competitors, and stay ahead with a sufficient budget, then opt for PPC ads. Go for a PPC brand awareness campaign and lucrative leverage results in a short period.

Both PPC and SEO are effective ways to bring traffic to the website. Eventually, a strategic plan can fascinate to get combined with the help of both SEO and PPC.

Promotion or Event

If you are planning to promote any service or product instantly? "Promo Time! 20% Discount on Product Before Tomorrow." For such a promo, SEO won't be an excellent strategy to work. Make a PPC ad live and get your promo orders.

Product or Service

Here, it's a bit tricky. You don't need to avoid SEO or PPC. For a better suggestion, you can utilize both organic and inorganic strategies coherently.

For longstanding results, you can opt for SEO and other content marketing strategies with it. For immediate outcomes related to lead generation, brand awareness, you can switch to PPC.

What is the ROI difference in both SEO and PPC?

SEO is a waiting game. You need to do detailed keyword analysis, optimize your website for targeted keywords, write long-form blogs, create internal links for navigation, work on fetching high-quality backlinks, do guest posting. Mainly, wait for the SERP ranking status. You can see the site growing organically. The quality and authority of the site will increase. Search engines will give high credibility based on your content relevancy and send quality traffic.

SEO is purely a waiting game. It works fantastic in the long term.

But, in PPC, it's instant. You would see results almost spontaneously. It's paid; Google will display the ad only whenever you pay.

Google will see your ads in the same way as they do SEO. The most important consideration here is, be cautious on budget and campaign optimization. If you weren't managing it properly, then it might ruin your budget and plan of action.

PPC is fast results but cost accordingly.

What is meant by PPC?

Pay Per Click brings quick results and immediate traffic from search engines. Setting a PPC campaign would fetch immediate results in terms of traffic or leads based on your requirements.

Essential work to do while setting up a PPC campaign

Keyword: Prioritize detailed keyword research based on volume, difficulty, demography, and geography.

Landing Page: Its mandate to have a well optimize landing page and relevant ad content.

Call-To-Action (CTA): CTA's are the pulling factor of visitors turn into leads and respective audiences. Use CTA's like Download, Call Now, Demo, Buy, etc. depends upon your Ad content.

Character Limit: Never waste characters. Use your words carefully to show the difference in your ad copies.

Promo & Offers: Use promotional offers to show the best deal to users to pull into your ads. It works perfectly for e-commerce segments.

A/B Testing: Do several testing by updating your ad copies, headlines, images, call to action (CTA), landing pages. The best-performing ad is monetized with the help of Click Through Rate (CTR).

Text Ads

Text ad appears whenever users search which the appropriate keyword we targeted.

Display Ads

They are banners ads you see on the website. Many websites sell space to make their banner live. It helps in retargeting the ads to the potential customer and close them with the respective sale.

Merits And Demerits of PPC

Some of the critical benefits of PPC campaigns are:

Brand Visibility

PPC ads make you rank above the organic results, so you have better brand visibility and stay ahead of your competitors.

Controlled budget

As you set the goal and cost of ad campaigns, at any point, you hold complete control of the budget.

Targeted Audience

You likely target to run the ads by targeted keywords, location, demographics, language, location, time, device, previous visitors, etc.

Higher Ranking

As you see the well-performing ads on the top of organic search results, you shall continually optimize them accordingly to achieve a better position with PPC campaign optimization.

Complete Control

It's versatile; you hold complete control like targeted locations, CTA, pricing, bullet points, etc.

Display advertising

It's always good to attract users visually. Google lets your products show your ads with relevant keywords. There is no way SEO is involved in this. You can optimize the campaign budget based on Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Quicker results

PPC works on a targeted keyword with the cost involved; it's quicker and faster in achieving the results.

Deeper Insights

Using Google Keyword Planner and Google Analytics tools, tracking the campaign performance is more manageable now. Track and monitor the impressions, clicks CTR, and optimize the campaign accordingly. 

Most importantly, the Quality Score plays a vital role in building PPC campaigns. Keep in mind, keyword-relevant needs to match the ad copies, targeted keywords with the landing page. Non-relevancy with poor UI and page speed of landing pages might affect the quality score, resulting in poor performance.

Demerits of PPC

Some of the demerits of PPC Ads are:

Ongoing Investment

If you stop paying the money, the campaign stops. Moreover, optimizing the campaigns will take sufficient time, increasing the cost quickly, explicitly targeting a highly competitive niche.

Not many like PPC

As its paid advertisement, many weren't interested in using PPC, as 70% of users avoid it.

What is meant by SEO?

SEO is a method that assists you to rank your website higher in SERP's

Attaining a good result in SEO takes time. However, once you reach a higher ranking, you will stay there.

If you aren't confident enough in handling SEO, there are SEO agencies that you can hire to accomplish your tasks.

Merits And Demerits of SEO

Let's see the merits and demerits of SEO:

Merits of SEO

Some of the significant benefits of deriving SEO strategies are:

Branding

If you are at the top of the organic ranking, you will receive maximum page views and impressions. It only increases your growth in terms of the performance aspect, but it also leverages branding awareness.

Drives surplus traffic

In the inception, using long-tail keywords is the best SEO strategy. Create content based on the funnel and implement conversion optimization strategies.

Increase Trust & Credibility

Users trust more into organic growth rather than paid. Ranking higher on SERPs would increase the credibility rate and trust among the users while surfing online.

Free Cost-per-click (CPC)

No cost involves like PPC. SEO is entirely free, and apart from time invest in optimization, everything is free!

Higher ROI

However, SEO is free! ROI is higher when compared to paid ads.

Good CTR

Maximum users trust SEO results; however, Click-Through Rate is far better compared to paid ads.

Demerits of SEO

Of course, there are some drawbacks with SEO that set apart from paid ads.

Frequent shift of ranking

Frequent updations of algorithms and competition make a frequent change in rankings.

The higher you rank, the surplus traffic you get. But, it might not be a permanent position, neither may be of competition nor algorithm changes.

There are several algorithms that Google has updated in recent years (Google Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Pigeon, Mobile, Rankbrain, Fred)

High Competition

Competition is the most annoying thing to be considered with SEO. You might see the massive volume of competition in the search results for a few volumes of keywords.

Optimizing the page with relevant backlinks from high authority sites are the ways to stay ahead of your competitors in this long marathon.

Indirect Link Building

Monitor closely with backlinks. Any unnatural or spammy links might destroy your ranking with SERPs. Link building is another tedious process in Off-Page SEO that takes a huge time investment.

Technical Issues

It is always required to have a close check with the web page crawl. Check whether all your website pages are crawled and indexed by search engines. Non-indexed pages might not rank well in SERPs.

Requires huge patience

High level of patience required while working with SEO strategies. You can see the results instantly in paid advertising, and required measures are taken accordingly without further delay.

However, that's not the case with SEO. It would take several days, even months, to see few changes done with the website.

Mistakes To Avoid in both SEO and PPC

Hope, you would understand how SEO and PPC work. Some of the mistakes are taken into consideration to avoid while implementing in your process.

Mistakes in SEO

Content Duplication: Duplicate content is a serious issue when it comes to SEO. Search engines will recognize your content as plagiarised if the content is duplicated. This results in the dropping of SERPs even might get penalized by search engines.

Keyword Stuffing: By the name itself, you can define how it works. Search engines won't entertain keyword stuffing. Repetition of a particular targeted keyword several times without its proper use will fall under it.

Cloaking: It's an old technique used to practice showing different content to users and search engines.

Mistakes in PPC

Targeted keywords

Try to avoid generic keywords with PPC campaigns, which might burn your fingers quickly.

Landing pages

Do not send your entire to the homepage. Every campaign has a different aspect of goal and other elements of targets to attain. It would be best if you figured which landing page respectively for its purpose. In a nutshell, Lead generation shouldn't be a home page where you would require a signup to capture the leads (Name, E-Mail, etc.)

Conclusion

Every organization has a strategic plan to follow and attain its goal. To increase the revenue, they opt for different approaches. After the arrival of the Internet, Cyberspace took a deep turn on the viewpoint of each business, entities to create a tremendous opportunity for brands to float business models in one single major platform. 

SEO and PPC both ensure to fulfill the demands of business models globally. It might either one or a combination of both; it all depends on your business requirements.

If you would like to know more about the process behind SEO and PPC or any expert support, please get in touch with us.