SEO v PPC – Companies of all sizes are understanding the significance of online marketing, especially with regards to search engines. Currently, people are more likely to end up on your website via a search engine such as Google, rather than going directly to it. In fact, recent research has found that 82% of people find their way to websites via search engines as opposed to direct links and other methods.
This demonstrates that it’s very important for your brand to have a strong presence. However, there are times when PPC is also a valid way of getting people to your site.
To succeed with either method, or with both of them, marketers should know their strengths and weaknesses of each method.
When should you use SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation refers to practices that are intended to drive a website to the first page of the major search engines in particular Google and to a lesser extent Bing.
SEO is very significant for online businesses, as we seen, 82% of the traffic that can be produced for any website will come from the search engines. The biggest search engine is undoubtedly Google, which has more than 400 million searches per day.
When constant results are desired. SEO has a relatively long development period. Getting to the first page of search engine results won’t happen overnight or even in a week. (Be very very wary of any organization that says they can do this in a short period of time) Getting to the top of Google or Bing will take time. However, once your website gets there by using accepted SEO methods, you will enjoy continued traffic. Also, if you keep up with your SEO campaign, working to maintain and improve results, you can stay on top for a long time and reap long-term benefits. When you wish to build an authority site. An authority website is an established resource center for a particular sector or niche. It is the “go to” website where members of that niche will defer to for information. An authority website, once it gets going, will be able to generate lots of traffic based on URL recall alone. The best way to establish such a website is by sustainably creating traffic to your pages, eventually building up a standing until it becomes popular enough to lead its market. The only way in today’s climate is to generate the traffic required is through clever content powered by smart SEO development. There are many factors that can contribute to this increase in Authority. Among them are amount of traffic generated, consistency of traffic generated, page rank, search engine rankings over a period of time, link popularity, and the like. All of these fall in the realm of SEO.
To do this takes a tremendous amount of work in creating and promoting content which in turn takes a great deal of time and money.
AdWords
When Is It Best To Use PPC?
Pay-per-click marketing is a method of advertising on search engine results pages. Basically, you bid to have your ads appear in the sponsored results when someone types in a query including your keywords.
Why is it named “pay per click”? Because you have to pay for every time a user clicks on the ad you are promoting.
The main Pay per click systems include Google AdWords, Yahoo Advertising, and Facebook’s advertising platform. Niche-specific PPC systems are also available. A very good example is PlentyOfFish.com’s advertisement option, which works well with dating offers.
So when would using PPC be of value?
The most obvious, is when immediate results are desired. PPC will deliver results fast. You can place an add and within the hour you will have visitors to your site This is because the moment your PPC campaign is approved and provided you have bid enough, your ads will immediately be displayed for millions of people to see. The traffic will almost be instantaneous. Hence, PPC works amazingly well with product launches, seasonal promotions, event-focused marketing, and similar online business campaigns. When highly targeted traffic is sought. Unlike SEO, PPC marketing will allow you to narrow down your prospects based on their demographic data. Many PPC platforms, like social media sites, allow you to promote to the age range, gender, income bracket, education level, and even marital status of the people who will see your add in their time lines. Popular social media sites like Facebook also allow you to target people based on their hobbies. These make PPC a powerful way of reaching the narrow band of people your business needs, and leading them to your web pages. When promoting a time-sensitive offer, Marketing products, services or events with an ending date is always a race against time. Often, the long development period of SEO campaigns would produce delayed results.
For these time-sensitive offers, the speed of PPC marketing would be perfect. Promoting an offer that will end in 2 days? No problem. PPC can deliver the traffic you need in a matter of minutes. When your website is not designed with SEO in mind. SEO requires content-rich websites that are regularly updated. This is the only way to 1) inform the search engines that your site is relevant, and 2) prompt the search engines to keep your site at the top of the pile. For websites such as this, traffic can be generated from PPC campaigns. If you want to dominate search results for your keyword category. PPC results are presented above the organic search results. This more noticeable position means that in many cases, as much as 48% of the search traffic goes to the top 3 sponsored links. By being absent from PPC you’re missing out on all those clicks to your competitors.
These are some situations when you might have an inclination toward one marketing method or the other. I personally believe one shouldn’t be thinking in terms of SEO vs PPC – but rather that both SEO and PPC are significant as well as complementary parts of an online marketing strategy.