As a business owner, it is essential to choose the right path that will help you grow. But, with so many options to choose from, it can become rather exhausting to pick the best route. In our conversations with budding and established businesses, we realised that the choice between SEO and PPC always tend to send entrepreneurs down a rabbit hole.
Both of these Digital Marketing strategies are effective, where choosing one could become a strenuous task.
To simplify it for you, we present this article. As your go-to expert for marketing and branding-related services, we prioritise ensuring that you are well informed about your business decisions. Choosing the right growth plan is one such task.
SEO VS. PPC:
To all those who are not aware of what SEO & PPC are, we will explain them briefly. But we strongly recommend you go through our blogs on these subjects for a deeper insight into the matter.
SEO:
SEO is an excellent way for businesses to increase their organic traffic. This process is a comprehensive one, which will have you touch base with aspects like branding, building a social presence, getting social validation, and more. SEO is a lengthy and time taking process that, when done right, can build a strong foundation for your brand over a period of time.
PPC:
PPC is an advertising model that allows you to direct users to your brand by posting ads on search engines and social platforms. Pay Per Click is an expense-based way of bringing users to your platform instead of earning their presence after having proven value. PPC is a good way to gain new users in a short period of time.
Now, let’s roll these two strong growth strategies against each other and see what each of them has to offer.
SEO Pros & Cons:-
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Sustainability:
SEO is based on ranking for keywords on Google or Bing. If you can rank well for your list of target keywords, expect to get steady traffic to your website. With a good SEO plan in place, you can continue to drive traffic even if you or your marketing guys take some time off to relax or focus on other things in the business. |
Takes Time:
Ranking in the top 10 search results of Google is not easy. It takes between 2-12 months to get your keywords ranked, and only 6% of the users make it to the top. So, if you are in a space where you need quick results, then relying on an SEO strategy for immediate results would not be the wisest choice. |
| Cheaper:
SEO is cheaper when compared to PPC. Let us show you how. Ahref’s blog gets upwards of 240,000 visits every month, and to get the same amount of traffic through PPC, they would have to spend over 700,000 USD a month. So, that comes to over 8 Million USD a year. With a team of 10 content creators to curate the content, they have saved millions. So, it is a good idea to choose the SEO route if you have the time to build your organic user base. |
Lack of Control:
Google algorithms are tricky and ever-changing. There is no complete visibility on the ins and outs of it. This takes away the control from you and places it in Google. Since it is also not targeted at an audience using specific tools, the kind and quality of leads or traffic generated cannot be predicted. |
| Trust and PR:
While PPC results appear above the organic ones, more than 70% of audiences prefer the organic searches. This is due to the trust that users generally place on Google’s algorithms. A naturally high organic ranking also boosts your position as the thought leader in the industry and is great for your Public Relations status and further activities. |
Requires Unique Content:
The internet is filled with content, and not all of them are great. To be on the top, the content that you provide should be unique, add value to the user, and most of all must inspire people to share the piece. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, the internet is also filled with content like these, which are occupying the lime-light currently. To reach the top, you would have to produce content that is better than the best, which is not an easy task. You would either be a domain expert in the topic that you wish to produce content in or hire a domain expert. Thus, making this tricky for small and medium-sized businesses. |
PPC Pros & Cons:-
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Quick Results:
PPC is fast, unlike SEO. Here, you would not have to wait for months or years to generate traffic. You could go ahead and set up a PPC campaign as we speak and see results on deployed campaigns. |
Expensive:
PPC can be rather expensive when not done right. The expenditure varies depending on the keyword you are targeting and its keyword popularity and difficulty. Sometimes, you could end up losing more money than you make with PPC campaigns. |
| Precision Targeting:
With PPC, you are not throwing a net in the ocean and hoping for the best. PPC allows you to target the users you intend to interact with down to the most minute details, including age, sex, demographic, geography, time of the days, days of the week, and interests. PPC is like going fishing, knowing that you want to catch Pomfret and coming back with a net full of Pomfret. |
Effectiveness Fades:
PPC campaigns are only effective if there is a hefty ad spend, and you have fresh creatives to roll out every time. Ad blindness is real and affects the PPC space the most. Users tend to ignore the ads if the same is displayed often with no change in the set of content pieces. In cases where businesses stop spending on PPC, they see a substantial drop in traffic and conversions. |
| Good for A/B testing:
PPC is best for A/B testing. To find the way that works best for your business, you can deploy campaigns and get results in a short time. Depending on how the campaign performed, you can analyze what worked well and what did not. You could also fine-tune performing campaigns by running them under different conditions to get the most effective way to reach out to your targeted group. |
Requires Constant Capital:
PPC is all about optimising your ads to the point where it gives the most return on investment, and most people do not get right in the first shot. It takes time to get it done, for there is no ‘that one mantra’ that will always work. As a business, you will have to run A/B tests with your PPC campaigns to get it to the point where you are receiving exponential returns. And this process costs you dear dollars. |
Conclusion:
In this article about SEO vs. PPC, we have seen the best of both growth strategies and their downsides. Instead of choosing one strategy over the other, curate a strategy that takes the best of both worlds – An SEO & PPC Strategy.
We, at The Go-To Guy, have the best Digital Marketing Experts who can help your organization with your marketing strategies. Contact us, and one of our experts will reach out to you to understand your business, target audience and then come up with ways to help you achieve your goals.
