In any business, sales go up and down. Meanwhile, you want your business to grow… In any way possible! This is understandable – you do your best to keep your sales up. So you invest in what you do in terms of marketing. However, not all marketing tools are good for every business. Namely, let’s see what is the situation when it comes to SEO vs PPC. Which technique generates more leads? And is there a right answer at all?
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What is SEO and what is PPC?
Ok, let’s start with the basics. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and PPC for Pay Per Click. If you haven’t applied any of the above, just know that in this day and age, everybody needs marketing strategy – and so do you! So now, let’s see what SEO can do for your business.
SEO is great for long-term results
SEO is the type of advertising that people use when they want to generate leads in an organic way. That’s why it is referred to as organic (natural) – you are not paying to get your way to the top. The one thing that you do is to optimize your website in order for it to appear on the higher position in search engines. When you think of it, it’s really a mix of art and science to publish data that will convince engines that your content is valuable to their users. And to understand why SEO is important, you need to know why browsers exist in the first place. Well, computing programs offer the best possible results to their users once they search for a specific term. So the only goal of a search engine is to give the most helpful result in the shortest period of time. To do this, browsers have both human and technical resources. With this, search engines send their so-called crawlers or spiders to search the Internet 24/7 and visit all the pages they bump into. Spiders then send all the new (and old!) information that they have found back to the data centre. This is a never-ending process.
SEO basics
So organic website optimization tries to have the ideal content that will crawlers recognize as such. In this way, your site will then rank higher in search results. Due to changes in the algorithm, SEO can mean different things. However, it should properly explain what your website does with content that is useful to users – and spiders. Most effective ways to do this is to create relevant blog content, do good social media marketing and share helpful videos. For example, if you have a moving company, you can find many search engine optimization tools at your disposal. Those will help you rank your site higher in Google (and other browsers), getting the user to click on exactly your website. With this, your lead (or potential future client) is born and sales will most probably go up.
Advantages and disadvantages of SEO
So if you are wondering how to generate more traffic for your website, SEO sounds amazing. It attracts over 85% of Internet traffic and ROI is easily monitored. But most importantly, its impact lasts for a very long time. But hold your horses there – SEO does have its downsides. In general, high positioning of the site on search engines, i.e. the organic traffic that creates, is the main (great) result of SEO activity. However, although it’s very stable it generally requires more time to be achieved. So the downside is that it takes a long time to see the results, so you probably need some expert to help you when you start. Also, it is more complicated than PPC and the results are hardly predictable. So yes, PPC draws leads right away while SEO is an ongoing process. But the more effort you put in SEO, the better and more stable rank you will have in the future.
PPC is great for fast results
Opposed to SEO, when using pay-per-click (PPC) you are buying leads through Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing etc. And it can improve even small businesses in the short run. With this type of paid advertising, you can show your ads in the upper (or sponsored) results section of the search engine’s results page. The keyword for your business is the one that determines the price of the click. You can also bid on the various keywords related to your business. Basically, you pay a fee when a user clicks on the ad and comes to your website. And here is a cold fact: Google, one of the world’s largest companies, earns most of its profits from its ads… Or to be more specific: 90% of its earnings!
Advantages and disadvantages of PPC
Ok yes, PPC is much, much faster than SEO technique. But yes again – it also has its downsides. As you already guessed it, it’s less effective in the long run. So if you want fast results, PPC is excellent for targeted traffic, and much more powerful in branding. Still, it can be expensive. After the end of the PPC campaign, your visibility in the search results is flat zero. Basically, PPC requires constant fine-tuning but if you hire someone to show you proper PPC advertising techniques, you will probably double your sales in no time.
So – which one should I use?
SEO vs PPC and which technique generates more leads is one of the eternal hot topics in the internet marketing world. If you look at it objectively and professionally, both of them have their purpose of existence. So what you decide to use depends on several things. Those who are a little bit more informed will often use the mix of both areas. Nevertheless, the paradox is that on SEO, which brings 75% of traffic from the search engine, spends less than 15% of the average search engine marketing budget. On the other hand, PPC, which brings about 25% of traffic from the search engine, holds about 80% of the same budget.
In a long run, SEO should always be a long-term strategy, while PPC should be used as a tactic that, if properly used, can really be very effective. Still, if you haven’t used anything so far and you decide on just one method, your business will surely benefit in some way.