PPC V SEO. Which is better for your website?

PPC V SEO. Which is better for your website? This has been an ongoing debate. Which is better, buying your way to the top of the search engines through a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign or cultivating your organic (or natural) search engine marketing strategy through search engine optimization (SEO)?

PPC V SEO. Which is better for your website? Deciding where your digital marketing spend should go is a hard decision for many business owners and the decision between SEO and PPC is often fraught with doubt about which is the better?

What is PPC?

When you buy visitors or “clicks” from Google or other search engines it is called pay-per-click (PPC). PPC allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by paying or bidding for keywords related to what you are selling or a service you’re providing.

What is SEO?

SEO is often referred to as “organic” or “natural” lead generation. SEO consists of optimizing your web pages to enhance their position in the naturally occurring search results. Organic SEO consists of making sure the search engine bots can crawl and understand what is on your web page and so that, ideally, they’ll rank your website higher than your competitors.

Benefits of PPC

Simply there is NO waiting: once your PPC campaign starts, you’ll immediately start to see more traffic, clicks, and conversions on your website. SEO can take weeks or months before you start to see your website move up the page results. PPC is scalable and controllable – you set your budget and have an idea of how many leads are you getting. This, in turn, helps you calculate an accurate budget for your digital marketing. SEO is not so cut and dry, and it can take longer or require more money if the industry or location your business needs to rank for it can be extremely competitive.

Benefits of SEO

Organic SEO is very cost effective. The labour costs of setting up and managing a PPC campaign are usually the same or even more than the labour costs of SEO, but then there are the continuous click charges you pay after set-up. Organic SEO is long lasting! A properly optimized website can maintain a high position in the search results long after a PPC campaign has been turned off.

Disadvantages of PPC

You have to pay to get good results and the more you pay the better the results according to Google. The competition for keywords has never been greater. Researching and selecting effective keywords to bid on is very time-consuming. Managing what you’re spending on keywords, measuring returns, adjusting how much you spend and playing the PPC game is a full-time job. Either you’ll be spending time doing it yourself or you’ll have to hire an experienced PPC specialist who can properly run your campaigns for you.

Disadvantages of SEO

SEO is very slow compared to PPC. It can take weeks or months after you optimize your web page to start seeing results, whereas PPC will start getting you leads straight away. Also SEO is an ongoing process. Your site will never be 100% “optimized,” it will only get more and more optimized as you put more work into it. The good news is that in the future your rankings will be better and you will hopefully be reaping the rewards of having invested in SEO. SEO is time-consuming, especially if you choose to do it yourself. Should you have the option to purchase SEO tools or to hire someone to do SEO for you, that will end up costing real money, not your own time.

Can PPC and SEO work together?

When combined, PPC and SEO can be quite powerful. In my view and well optimised website with a PPC campaign is the best approach. Optimisation is not only about the keywords on your website but how your website is built. PPC campaigns take into account the SEO on your website and if done correctly SEO can reduce your overall PPC costs. Ask yourself these questions and determine optimal mix of PPC and SEO for your website.

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