Last Updated on 14/01/2025 by Arabella Brown
SEO Vs PPC
To make sure your business is a cut above the rest, you need to create a strong digital marketing campaign. There are many tactics you can leverage, and you need to think about which ones are best for your company. Two of the most common marketing tactics are search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click campaigns (PPC) or Google Ads to be more specific.
When looking at SEO vs PPC it is important to understand the difference between SEO and PPC marketing. But what do you need to know about these 2 traffic-generating tactics?
The difference between search engine optimization and pay-per-click marketing is that SEO focuses on getting traffic from organic search by optimizing your pages to rank in a search engine’s organic results, whereas PPC focuses on getting traffic from paid search, social, and display. In this article, we will look at the pros and cons of both.
Here are the advantages of SEO.
- More sustainable for long-term growth. SEO can be more sustainable because your traffic will continue to increase even if you stop updating the page.
- Builds organic traffic. SEO enables you to build more organic traffic, which refers to the number of people who find your website using a search engine.
- Improves trust and credibility. SEO can improve your trust and credibility since potential customers won’t see a sponsored tag next to your meta title on the SERP.
- Less expensive long term. SEO isn’t as expensive in the long run since you don’t have to pay every time someone clicks on your website.
Here are some downsides to SEO.
- Results aren’t immediate. It can take a long time before you land on the first page, let alone at the very top of the SERP.
- Competitive keywords. Some of the keywords you want to target are probably very competitive. This means that many people are vying for the same terms, which can make it difficult for you to stand out from the crowd.
- Constant search engine algorithm updates. Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, making it hard for you to stay at the top of the page.
- Tedious and time-consuming. You need to spend a long time figuring out what type of content you want to share and how you want to structure it. Plus, learning the ropes of SEO can be a tedious task.
What are some advantages of PPC?
- PPC is fast, in fact PPC is almost instant. You can head over to any ad platform and start a campaign right away.
- PPC allows for granular targeting. Most PPC platforms will allow you to choose who you want to target (e.g., demographics, geography, interests, etc.).
- PPC allows for quick experimentation. The nature of PPC is fast feedback. You can set up a campaign, run A/B tests, and monitor the results to see what works and what doesn’t.
- Comparatively, SEO takes time and, thus, it can be difficult to attribute success or failure to any single individual change or tactic.
What are some cons to PPC
- PPC can get prohibitively expensive – If you’re in a competitive industry like insurance, PPC can get expensive fast.
- PPC can lose effectiveness. The longer your campaigns run, the less effective they become, people start seeing your ads too often. The messaging becomes stale, and novelty effects are real. PPC is not set-it-and-forget-it either. Ad blindness is real. You’ll have to constantly refresh your existing ads (headline, copy, images, etc.) to make them work in the long term.
- You’ll need money to make money – PPC means you’ll need a budget to begin a campaign. You may even lose money in the first few months as you figure out how to optimize your campaigns.
SEO vs. PPC: Which is better?
Neither SEO nor PPC is better or worse than the other. Both are legitimate sources of traffic. So the real answer: it depends. There are some situations where one channel may make more sense. It all depends on the clients services or products and the market, research is key but a commitment to marketing means even more. You have to be in it to win it, it’s that simple.
Using SEO and PPC together
You can use SEO and PPC together to maximize the benefits of each and create effective marketing campaigns.
If you want to boost your visibility, you can use a PPC campaign to get your name out there fast. Doing so will help get your brand in front of people quickly.
Then, as you increase your online presence, you can boost your organic traffic by running an SEO campaign. As you get more organic visibility, you can reduce the amount of money you spend on PPC while maintaining your traffic through a strong SEO campaign.
You can maximize your online visibility if you invest in a strong digital marketing strategy that uses SEO and PPC. While both SEO and PPC are beneficial, you need to know how to use them effectively. That means investing in the right tools and people, like us.
If you would like our advice or to engage with us, please do contact us on projects@icaruscommunications.co.uk or contact owen@icaruscommunications.co.uk
