Last Updated on 17/07/2024 by Caroline McAuley
SEO VS ppc : Two power houses of modern digital marketing.
These days a new platform is available every month it seems, promising more leads, clicks and return on revenue. Marketers flock in hordes to their war chests to throw valuable budget at new social media platforms and calls for ‘ more budget’ ‘and promises of traffic and revenue. But seriously what id we looked at the two power houses in the room, SEO and PPC and perhaps more importantly their part in Google, the worlds biggest seared engine and in turn website platforms such as wordpress that are geared towards working with Google and these two major resources of producing traffic and ranking websites.
Each new service created on the Internet is created while keeping users in mind. A simple web page, blog, or application without visitors loses it’s rationale. your new website is like a new hotel on a mountain surrounded by trees with no roads in or out. In order to attract visitors, many promotional activities should be performed to be noticed. Due to the fact that most of us use search engines to find information, they are used as an essential part of marketing efforts. All efforts we say, even social media – ought to be geared to bringing ideal audiences to websites as a core strategy.
Let’s look at some terms before we look at the sustainability of SEO VS PPC.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a broad phrase, which includes a number of activities aiming to promote your website and therefore attract traffic to it. The traffic may be free (organic), generated by the SEO or paid, generated by PPC campaigns.
Although both types of activity are used for the same purpose, they differ in their characteristics.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a part of these activities that are related to marketing, based on optimizing websites for search engines, in addition to positioning.
PPC (Pay Per Click) are activities often associated with tools such as AdWords, which are based on the accounting model, where we pay for each click of our ads. While the concept of PPC as a model of payment refers to the whole area of paid advertising, in the case of search engine marketing, it’s only related to sponsored links.
The organic traffic and the paid traffic are independent of each other, but using them together could give your efforts optimal performance in addition to producing leads and conversions, monetising your website or digital marketing.
SEO VS PPC, when to use it?
Choosing PPC and SEO depends entirely on your search engine marketing goals, the time in which you want to achieve them and a budget that you are able to invest in. Both SEO and PPC take time to set up, implement and optimise and further time to continue to develop. It is an ongoing strategy. There is no quick fix to PPC as many will claim, and there certainly is no quick route to gaining higher rankings over competitors on SEO.
Google ads is a self learning platform that creates opportunities for account strategists to make decisions on, almost daily. Whilst PPC can kick start traffic to your site, if your site is not built with SEO in mind its will not necessarily benefit from one or the other. Both organic and paid advertising will have benefits and can be measured in analytics. At Icarus we build SEO friendly websites planned with keywords that are reflected in Googles keyword searches, we then feed data back into content and social media campaigns. We want quality traffic for our clients, and we aim to be competitive on their behalf and responsible with budgets.
So is it SEO VS PPC?
That is the premise and the subject of the article but in reality, SEO and PPC work very well together. Both are Google products essentially and Google’s search engine presence is absolute without any doubt – there is no bigger search engine in the world. SEO will give sustainability and a well run PPC campaign will allow flexibility to adjust dials for traffic and markets in the form of an auction. Working with both has ups and downs but there are no short cuts, low budget PPC can help well planned SEO and vice versa.
Icarus Communications Ltd are a client focussed marketing agency with deliverables of website design, marketing campaigns and strategies, advertising and content creation. We also rely a lot on marketing data and not so much on prophecies.
If you would like our advice or to engage with us, please do contact us on projects@icaruscommunications.co.uk or owen@icaruscommunications.co.uk
