SEO or PPC? This question keeps on circling around stakeholders of organizations of different sizes. It has become a subject in all debates in the arena of digital marketers as these two approaches generate the lifeblood of any online endeavor which both have something to say in the name of traffic.

In truth, both strategies do work insanely amazing when they are only carried out properly. However, the use of these methods, either on a stand-alone activity or a combination of both, truly depends on what your current situation is. Every business entity has a unique and dynamic situation. Whether it pertains to the company’s goals and objectives, the products/services being sold, the business status against competitors, or just how the customers behave and use the web, every part of your business has to be considered.

In order for you to get the most bang for your buck, you need to create a plan that will take you to the most prominent position in the search engine result (SERP). Since the amount of traffic is what dictates the success of a business, you need to think which, or otherwise consider embracing the fruitful relationship of both. Yes, these two options are proven to drive prospects to your site but you need to weigh up each of them in a way that it should also agree with your marketing budget and present business situation.

In this post, we will throw a light on these two important digital marketing concepts- their differences, advantages and disadvantages and their integration. Get things done and learn by heart the things that revolve around both worlds – SEO and PPC.

What are the differences between SEO and PPC?

An obvious thing that would probably distinguish each of the two concepts is how they are being presented or placed in the search engine result. With Google’s new SERP layout (on a desktop), PPC or paid search appears on the top spot of the page (as product listing ads and as text ads). As the top right side of ads was removed, additional spots were added over SEO organic results.

Also, these two methods have a different way of earning website traffic. In PPC or pay per click, you will have to pay a price to search engine for every ad that is clicked. And that’s the only way of getting visitors to the site. Search engine advertising is a form of PPC wherein an advertiser bid for an advertising space for targeted keywords on SERP.

SEO, on the other hand, is purely “free traffic”. Through effective SEO efforts, a website can gain a volume of organic traffic by natural search results.

Pros and Cons of Search Engine Optimization

SEO Downside

SEO, Search engine optimization involves a number of techniques and methods aimed to pull up a website’s rank in SERP. This should be taken in control by someone who is inspired in finding new ways to bring in traffic and who is never shaken with the absolute uncertainties that it has.  You can struggle to do it on your own but one easy step is to seek for help from organic SEO services. Just make sure that you have checked on their claims before spending a fortune on them.

SEO starts off very slowly. It would take days, weeks, months or even years of hard work before you can reap the rewards. In other words, it would take a while before you can see the growth of your desired ROI and CPA (click per action). Because of that, we can directly say that SEO is more of a time investment than of a financial one.
After mentioning those well-known drawbacks of doing SEO, do take a little side trip. This list will explain more closely in details the not-so-wonderful part of the world of SEO

When you are in a competitive niche, it is expected that you will have to place a big investment…

 This is very true when you are operating in a “dog-eat-dog” niche. A high-quality SEO is ain’t free, nor it is cheap. If you want to have considerable results, it is likely that you will turn out having viable expenses for SEO marketing services activities like consultation, outreach services, technical strategies, and campaign management.

The danger of fast and too much success…

SEO efforts will increase and grow by accumulation. Even if you stop, the earlier accomplishment will still be working and will leave a lasting effect.  So when SEO is on its full swing, leads or sales will quickly increase, and the end result is you will be sacrificing customers satisfaction. Clearly, because the upsurge is more than what you can handle or cater.

SEO has its uncertainties…

Marketers are wary about going into risk because there is no guarantee of everything. Landing on the first page of Google is very important and it is the ultimate goal of your SEO. However, with all the keywords in place, there is no assurance that you will own the most desired spot.

Also, with Google’s ever-evolving world, you have to stay up to date. With all the month to month basis updates of Google’s algorithms, we see it far too often the need to be in a forward-looking perspective. In fact, 40% of the marketers says that the hardest part of SEO is the maintenance. The fluctuation of its algorithms, frankly, is not a roll with butter.

You will be under the watchful eyes of your competitors…

If your visibility in the search engine increases, your business too will get nearer to your potential customers and so as to your competitors. As soon as they noticed you, they may spring up to compete at their best arms.

Getting Penalized

Google is in constant change and the change is very constant.  They are always improving their techniques and algorithm to serve the searchers with relevant results. These changes too are meant to make the lives of the “black hat” marketers even harder. This is, however, good for those who advocates good SEO practices based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Nonetheless, keeping up with the changes without ever knowing the breakdown from Google can be pretty unnerving. It’s too sad when all your efforts can be taken away from you just too soon without any clue at all of why it happened.

SEO Advantages

Unlike paid promoting channels like PPC, SEO is much cheaper and will cost the least ( this option is an advantage if you only have a minimal marketing budget)
Generates a steady flow of free traffic. SEO holds the opportunity of striking on to gigantic flow of searchers in search engines. Just this past year, the number of people who accessed the internet amounted to 46.8% of the total global population. This number is expected to grow by significant digits.CTR stats shows that organic results are more clicked on by searchers than paid listings. Searchers are looking for solutions to their queries through the search engine and it turned out that 70% of that solutions are from the organic results. In addition to that, estimated 40% of searchers click on the first top result of SERP while 70% just ignore the list of paid ads and instead they prefer clicking on to organic results.

SEO makes good result without costing a lot of resources.

SEO allows you to battle with the titanic brands on equal footing.

You owe SEO the chance of establishing your brand as the leader of your niche. SEO can define your business status given that you succeed in doing so.
SEO is the key strategy in cultivating potential customers. By achieving your SEO end goal which is to reach top 1 of search results, you can then take on your lead generation.
Marketers will have a propensity of gaining long-term benefits as SEO efforts will produce tremendous growth over time.
SEO live to promote sustainability because of high quality traffics in the coming days.
Eventually, SEO will give a higher ROI when its level of activity is at its highest.

How does PPC Build your Business?

PPC or pay-per-click is a method used to advertise on search engine result. To start off, you bid for keywords so that if the searcher types it, he will see your ads. And so when he clicks on it, you will get to pay the search engine a little fee. Placing that your PPC campaign is in proper positioning (must be on its average sweet spot), the result of the click (sales) must exceed the cost that you paid or at least must break even.

The Huge Benefits of PPC

Advertisers are able to convey their message clearly to their target audience. Also, they can clearly assess the quality of traffic they are getting out from the search engine clicks.
Searchers are patronizing paid ads than any other types of digital advertising. Therefore, searchers appreciate that they are advertised to for as long as the search engine generates relevant results to their query.

Anyway, Google already has a formula to make certain that they get to provide what the searcher needs.

Search engines get their stream of revenues from advertisers to simultaneously provide service. Google, for instance, get 90% of its total income from advertising.

The advantages of using PPC in your online business

PPC can deliver instant gratification out from the sudden increase in your traffic. Based on the SERP layout, PPC results are on the top spot. Considering that 50% of the search traffic are earned by the first three links, therefore, you must engage in PPC or else you will be granting a loss!

You will readily have prospects at the very beginning.

You can have your target audience with the help of your targeted keywords. You are able to optimize and customize your ads by choosing high intent keywords for more attainable results.

Paid ads occupy the top spot of SERP. You can set up a campaign in just a couple of days and hype up after some weeks.

PPC lets you in control of your marketing budget. If your business exists to cater local services/products and you will only be needing a small set of keywords, then PPC is just the right method for you. On that point, you can find enough leads without spending a huge amount.

Budding businesses can increase their commercial value (from customers perception on your brand name).

It can improve your brand’s visibility (most advantageous if you are in eCommerce) and helps you drive traffic to your site immediately. Product listing ads will enable searchers to draw an impression over your product because of the image shown in the ads.

You have better options for this strategy as other advertising networks like Bing Ads, Facebook and Twitters are also racing to hook advertisers. It means to say that you will not be monopolized by one giant advertising platform (Adwords) alone.

You can perform A/B testing when you are in PPC, also called split testing, wherein you can note the difference in the variants of two web pages. Basically, the purpose is to know which one performs better. This experiment is done by showing two or more variants of a page to users at random. By means of statistical analysis, you can directly determine which variation execute better to meet conversion goal. This data-based information will officially lift the guesswork of optimizing your websites PPC campaign.

The Disadvantages of PPC strategy

PPC cost can soar high if you are up for international campaigns. Not only that but when you are into this “pay and play” game, you will be needing much higher upfront cost. What also scares the marketers over PPC is that the cost is rocketing as more advertisers compete for traffic. There are cases that the cost they pay to earn traffic just doesn’t supersede because the sales don’t exceed the costs. Thus, if your marketing budget is tight as your shoestring, then PPC might not be good for you to use.

You bring zero traffic if you stop feeding funds for your PPC campaign. In contrast to SEO, PPC requires you to constantly fuel the campaigns with money to maintain traffic and leads.

While Google is about to take control of your budget, you too should watch it (your Adwords budget). However, optimizing ads are hard to maneuver and requires you to deal with it a handful of times to make it well set up. Hence, you will be needing an expert to manage all the variables in your PPC account.

Seo and PPC Working Together – A Holistic Business Strategy

After discussing the truth and facts, let’s go over to how these two will work side by side. Let’s bury the hatchet and bring these two closer together ( At least for now ).

Keywords that are financially infeasible in PPC can be move to SEO. It’s hard to let go of keywords that are high cost, low converting but have high search volume.

The data that you will need for SEO can come from PPC. Since PPC can supply real-time data (like a streak of lightning). It is wise to utilize them for the advantage of SEO.

Marketing opportunity can come with expiration dates. When you are promoting a time-sensitive offer, SEO might deliver tardy results. Now, this is when PPC should come to play.

Combined SEO and PPC can lead you to a stronger customer- base because of maximized online visibility.

The use of eye-catching images for PPC product listing ads can add up to web presence aside from text organic results from SEO. Although SEO can provide that in rich snippet, PPC is more quick to employ.

There are instances when SEO efforts will result in a dramatic increase in traffic yet visitors are not converting. Maybe because they are ducking out from your site. In this situation, you will have to do some remarketing. After meeting a hesitant shopper, a simple reminder of your business will do. By using PPC. you can target your ads to those who have the most interest in your products or services.

PPC can assist you with short terms gaps while you need time to fix your SEO strategy after being hit by Google’s algorithm updates. When things aren’t going well, PPC is there to support your existing SEO efforts.

It’s time to wind things up, and we hope that by now you had your own answers too…

If you are just starting up, do some trialing to avoid being crashed and burned. Be perceptive and find the side that works to your advantage, then scale up…

So for every situation that you will be in, think of which best foot to put forward (SEO or PPC) or if the situation calls for a double punch then why not do both. What’s most important is to hit the goal – earn one step ahead of the competition!