SEO vs. PPC: Differences, Advantages, Disadvantages

This article gives clear insights into when and where to use SEO or PPC within your large digital marketing strategy

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Confused about choosing between SEO and PPC for your Business

This article gives clear insights into when and where to use SEO or PPC within your large digital marketing strategy.

Differences between PPC and SEO: 

PPC (Pay per click ads) are displayed at the top of the page above organic listings, and these ads are also influenced by SEO.

Traffic generated through SEO is free of cost but takes a lot of time and hard work. Whereas Traffic generated through PPC costs per click. SEO and PPC benefit each other when strategically aligned and integrated.

SEO: Improve your organic Traffic

Pros of organic Traffic from search engines:

Awareness

SEO is a process of improving the visibility(position) of your website or blog in search engines, i.e. pushing your Business in front of potential users for your targeted keywords, which creates some awareness about your Business or services among customers or users.

Branding

Branding is creating a positive impression for your Business that distinguishes your business products and service from your competitors, making your Business an authoritative voice for a given topic, products, and services.

Improving your site’s visibility for business commercial search terms and informational queries can positively affect branding.

Branding changes people’s perception of your company and creates Business and brand awareness.

Credibility and trust

Positioning your website in the top 3 places of organic search results for your service-related keywords can influence audience perception and generates trust and credibility in your company.

Users ignore ads and opt for organic results.

Maintaining Strong positive Reviews on all the review sites will strengthen the user’s trust in your products and services.

Website traffic

Improving site traffic creates more opportunities to educate a prospect as to why they should prefer you.

Cost per click

Traffic coming from organic search is free it doesn’t directly charge for each click or impression. but improving the visibility will take more time and effort.

Return on investment (ROI)

Return on money spent is more from organic search engine traffic compared to PPC.

Cost

SEO is very cost-effective compared to other marketing tactics for creating brand awareness and generating Traffic to the site.

Sustainability

Organic Traffic can uphold a business for a long time even if the marketing budget is cut down. Your constant effort will be paid off, unlike paid search marketing, where Traffic stops the moment you stop paying.

Improved click-through rate (CTR)

Users prefer to check the top organic listings other than top positioned paid ads, while there are some exceptions to the above assumption.

More clicks overall

To maximize results (improve clicks and impressions), better visibility is needed in both organic and paid results.

Scope

To maximize reach (scope) for new queries every day you need strong organic visibility. You don’t want to pay for all sorts of clicks or promote every piece of content on your site.

Strategic advantage

Improving the visibility of a site is not that quick and easy. This is, of course a good thing and also a bad thing because once you have positioned your website in the top organic results, it is not easy for your competitors to replace your site. This gives you an edge over your counterparts if they are relying on paid search marketing.

Cons of SEO

· off-page SEO tactics like quality link building are hard to learn. a strategy and expert support is always needed.

· companies need to procure strong content assets to achieve better organic visibility. Not all companies have the needed resources to handle content development, and this can pose a problem.

· Most of the Organic Traffic comes from informational or before-purchase search queries. of course, this Traffic is valuable but a better strategy is required to convert those users to leads or purchases.

· If you a starting a business and the keywords you chose to show results that giants like eBay and Amazon dominate, then you need to rebuild your strategy.

· SEO always doesn’t fit all kinds of businesses.

PPC: Laser-targeted visibility

CTRs and trust, credibility highly superimposed and inclined to organic search. So, why should businesses opt for paid search?

Check some of the benefits of PPC:

Position on the page

Paid Search ads always appear above the fold in search engines, with three ads on mobile and four on desktop. A user if will see paid ads even if he chooses to scroll the results page.

Improved ads

Paid search ads take more space to display features such as messages, locations, calls, site links, locations, pricing, and callouts.

Visual product ads

Google ads provide the feature of visually displaying shopping ads (with images, prices) which help users see the product before clicking on it. This improves CTR.

Brand visibility

Paid search ads can be controlled which makes it easy to target the right audience. Even if the customer backs off and does brand research before clicking on your ad, that visibility pays interest to your marketing.

Budget

You can control the cost per click and cost per impression and total budget manually.

Targeting

Paid search ads create a laser-targeted way to put your Business in front of the right customers. Ads can be targeted by many factors such as keywords, day and time of the week, demographics, device, audience based on previous visits.

Speed

Paid search marketing is the faster way to display your Business in front of potential customers at the very moment they are intended to buy.

Agile

You can get feedback fastly on a new product lunch just by running a short PPC ad Campaign. Speed gives agility.

Marketing intelligence

Unlike organic search, paid search does not have any privacy in terms of revealing or tracking the keywords the user used while looking for information, products, and services.

Analytics tools like Google Analytics can track the conversions and collects the keywords that lead to conversions at what percentage and cost.

This information collected from the marketing tools can be used in SEO and all other advertising platforms to improve the results.

A/B testing

You can also experiment with different landing pages, call-to-action-buttons, split-test ads to get the best results. This information collected can be used in all other traditional and digital marketing platforms to get the best results.

Stability

stability in google ads results can be retained easily even though there are small changes they have a lower impact and can be managed easily when compared to organic results. Results of Organic results depend on many factors like location, page speed, DA, etc.

With the right usage of match types and detailed analysis of search, term reports can help in removing the negative keywords and unwanted search results and increase Return of Investment gradually.

Cost

A well set up, highly optimized, and perfectly managed PPC account can cut down the cost and increase returns.

Disadvantages of PPC:

Advertisers should be aware of some of the challenges posed while running PPC campaigns.

PPC can be expensive: 

Costs can increase quickly if you are running international campaigns and targeting entire countries.

constant investment: 

· As you stop paying for ads your ads will also stop generating leads, Traffic.

· It seems like a bad move if compared to SEO, But SEO also needs constant efforts. But the organic Traffic coming from SEO can be a little more robust.

· There are numerous options available for paid advertising with PPC. choosing the wrong options can influence results.

· Getting into Bidding wars with other advertisers can increase your costs.

· Your PPC ad copy can be easily copied and competitors can easily evaluate your entire funnel.

· Monitoring and handling PPC Account, bids, positions, CTR’s, Quality scores require a professional who can optimize them successfully and increase returns.

SEO or PPC?

It is difficult to decide between SEO and PPC because it depends on several factors like business situation, location, time, competition , etc.

If You’re running a small business that has less competition and only needs few leads per week. Then you can get good search visibility in organic results with SEO within less time and little spend.

If you have an e-commerce store that competes with giants like Amazon, Flipkart, other online retailers, and you need quick results, running PPC ads will be the better move for better results.

SEO and PPC

Integrating SEO and PPC can give you better results than your competitors.

The benefits of utilizing SEO and PPC together include:

· Keywords and Conversion data collected from Pay per click ads with the help of analytical tools can be used for SEO to better search visibility.

· Increased overall Traffic to the site with the Traffic coming from organic search and paid search ads.

· High search volume, high cost per click keywords, low conversion keywords can be used for organic search.

· Good search results obtained after A/B testing of ad copy and landing pages can also be used to improve organic search visibility and better landing pages for higher CTRs.

· Remarketing allows you to target first-time visitors of organic search by sending or displaying customized ad copies to them to remind them and get back to your site for the desired action.

· Keywords must be tested in PPC before trying to zeroing on long-term SEO Strategies.

· Target potential users at all stages of the customer journey from enquiring, knowing, and comparing with competitors to purchase with commercial keywords.

· Increase awareness by having both strong organic and paid visibility.