The internet provides a great opportunity for new businesses and advertising since almost everyone has access to it nowadays. It is easy to promote products, businesses, and services by creating online advertisements and websites.
These websites can be visited by anyone that has access to the links. Still, the challenge with gaining visitors is that there are millions of websites on the internet to compete with. It has been a huge problem for businesses to make their websites more noticeable for their targeted customers.
To provide a solution for this website management problem, several marketing techniques were developed by different people to attract visitors to their websites.
Today, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) are the most effective marketing techniques used by businesses and companies to make their websites more accessible and more popular to the public. First, let us learn more about these two marketing techniques, and then we will examine their differences from one another.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing technique of utilizing a website’s content to increase its visibility and credibility. This is done by websites so that search engines would show the site’s content as top search results.
In SEO, a business owner publishes a lot of high-quality content with optimized keywords related to their business. These may include articles, blogs, and product reviews. The website content is optimized so that certain keywords will match a search engine’s algorithm, thus increasing the website’s chances to rank higher in keyword searches. This means there will be more chances that a user will click on the website’s link because it is ranked higher in search results, thus gaining more visitors for the website.
What is PPC?
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a marketing technique that involves paying a fee for every click on one of the ads posted for your business. In this method, you are basically “buying” visits to your sites. Although this type of marketing strategy is costly, this guarantees an advantage over websites that do not use any similar marketing techniques because ads about your business will appear on top of all organic (unpaid) search results. This technique lets you bid for the spots allotted in search results for paid website advertisements. These advertisements are usually highlighted compared to other links.
There are many factors to consider to ensure that your PPC strategy will be effective in the long run. You must consider the relevance of your keywords, the quality of your landing page, the creativity of your advertisement. A quality score is given to you by each search engine. If you optimize each factor, you can land a spot in the advertisements in search results.
Now that we have learned the fundamentals of each marketing technique, we will now compare each on how they fare on the following factors that are relevant for website management and for growing an online business.
1. Cost
One of the most notable differences between SEO and PPC is that using SEO techniques is almost free and PPC uses paid ads. Using SEO, you would just have to make different content that would be engaging and interesting to the readers.
PPC, on the other hand, as the name implies, would require a business owner to pay so that ads for his/her business would show up on top of search results. However, the business would only need to pay when a user has clicked on the ad (i.e., visited the site through clicking the ad).
2. Ranking and Accuracy
As for the search results ranking, the PPC search result ads appear on the top of all search results, while high-quality search-engine-optimized content appears above all other results but below the paid ads.
The accuracy of the content presented to users also differs for PPC and SEO. When focusing on SEO, the business can tailor the keywords used by the site to more specific terms related to its products or services. This is why the site can present to the users content that is relevant to them.
3. Traffic
SEO and PPC rely on different kinds of traffic. For SEO, organic traffic is generated since visitors have selected the search result that interests them more. Organic traffic is also known as unpaid traffic because the site does not pay for its content to be on top results or to be visited by customers.
On the other hand, PPC involves paid traffic since the visits to the page are acquired through commercial means (i.e., by paying ad businesses to promote your content).
4. Timeframe
Using SEO strategies would result in long-term gains since the quality of content matters. As time goes by and more people visit the website, the site gains more credibility, making it rank higher on search results due to its relevance. On the other hand, using PPC would only offer short-term gains as long as the business wants to pay for the ads so that it would land on top of the search results.
5. Return on Investment
When considering the return on investment, the returns through SEO would be slow but higher, while returns for PPC would be fast but lower. Since less cost is spent on SEO as compared with PPC, it would have higher returns. However, you can’t tell specifically when it would be since you are relying on organic traffic.
For PPC, a business can gain the amount invested faster. The downside is that it would need to spend again to sustain paid ads, thus lower returns.
SEO and PPC may have several differences in terms of cost, accuracy, traffic, and return on investments, but these marketing techniques are very useful, especially for newly founded websites. A good combination of both marketing strategies would be a wise investment decision to make.
For website owners aiming to expand their businesses through the internet, consider investing in these marketing techniques to increase visitors to your website to promote certain campaigns at certain times. Having a set SEO strategy will help long-term, while a quick PPC campaign will help to promote specific marketing strategies in the short term, like the launch of a new product or service.
With over a million websites to compete with, having an edge using these marketing techniques will certainly pay off in the future of your business or company. So, start learning a thing or two about SEO and PPC or hire experts in digital marketing who can help your business grow.
