When creating your marketing blueprint and deciding how to allocate your time and resources to it, you should consider a few crucial distinctions. SEO and PPC (Pay Per Click) ads are two major digital marketing strategies, but you need to understand the difference between them to adopt the right approach for your business.
This article will explain whether you should invest in SEO or PPC to achieve better traffic and conversion results. It becomes even more critical when you are on a shoestring budget. SEO helps boost your search engine ranking and makes your website more relevant to users’ queries.
You can’t pay to rank high in organic rankings, this can be either a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. Furthermore, Google is committed to keeping organic search content extremely relevant and trustworthy for the users.
On the flip side, PPC ads are paid advertisements that we see next to the organic search results if you are looking at SERPs and also at other places online. It’s important to note that running paid ads will not improve your SEO rankings and Google refutes such false claims.
Google started with organic search results, and still, it is its biggest USP (Unique Sales Proposition). When you perform a search on Google, organic listings come just after paid ads or sponsored results.
It’s crucial to optimize your website properly to increase the visibility of your website. With increased visibility, your site will show up quite often when relevant search phrases are used. When improving your site’s SEO, there are several things you can tweak.
Google Pay Per Click advertising offers many solutions, and Google Ads is one of them. It allows marketers to bid on the chance to appear as an ad next to the organic searches when a user makes a query to look for what you have to offer. However, in this case, you pay when someone clicks on your ad.
These ads provide you the opportunity to be in front of a wider audience online. You also have the freedom to tweak your ads at any point in time to target a specific customer segment by demographics or interest.
Apart from that, it also allows you to promote a specific deal. It’s an excellent opportunity for small businesses and startups who cannot invest in their SEO. Still, at the same time, they need enhanced visibility to keep themselves in business by promoting sales.
Beyond Google search, Google Ads also allow you to be in front of your audience through your ads on relevant websites in the Google Display Network or GDN.
GDN comprises thousands of websites on the Internet, where you can access many potential customers.
You can also have the freedom to pick specific sites from the network and select the type of audience you would like to target. You can also let Google create a customer list to meet your objectives.
It’s important to note that Google Ads don’t provide the same results as SEO, and it will also not help you improve your natural search rankings. However, they give so much flexibility that you can grab your potential audiences’ attention right when it’s crucial for you. It also helps you even if you are a startup and don’t have enough resources and money to invest.
The ultimate objective of Google is to provide relevant and high-quality search results to users. If businesses are allowed to pay for higher rankings, the user experience will suffer and users will not get the required information through Google search. It will defeat the very purpose Google was created for.
Google Ads can’t boost your SEO, but when you create a Google Ads account, it provides you several tools that you can use to optimize your site. For example, you can use its Keyword Tool to create a list of phrases and keywords relevant to your business. These keywords are frequently used and have the potential to generate a lot of searches. You can include these keywords in your site’s content to boost your search rankings.
Google also offers some ad tracking tools through its ads account to measure the impact of tweaks made to your website and ad campaigns, leading to more visitors and conversions. Such insights are beneficial in optimizing your website and campaigns in a much better way, which is not possible without using these tools.
Google offers these tools to its ad users for free. The search analytics report comes built-in with Google Analytics, and it can track the queries and keywords that are attracting more visitors to your site even when you aren’t using Google Ads. These insights are incredibly valuable from an SEO perspective.
Before you figure out where to invest your marketing budget, you need to understand SEO’s main advantages.
Here are some essential facts about organic SEO:
Even with the tremendous advantages SEO offers, it is not the right fit for every business. It has the following cons.
Ultimately, it’s your call. It’s worth considering that both SEO and PPC have their pros and cons and help your business in different ways. These days, people search online before making a buying decision, which applies to all products and services. People use Google to check business reviews and answers to their queries. They also check recommendations from influencers and verified customers and both SEO and Google Ads help get in front of these potential customers.
While SEO is a traditional approach that gives your business the required visibility and the chance of being found by internet users worldwide, it takes time and organized efforts to achieve rankings on the first page of Google.
If you want to reach out to the people looking for the products you are offering, you can leverage Google Ads. It works immediately without having to wait for your site to move up in natural searches. PPC is helpful regardless of your business’s size, and it allows you to customize your campaign while on the go.
Since we have discussed the pros and cons of SEO and PPC, it’s time to address the big issue — which strategy is right for your business? Even though it varies based on your situation and what you want to achieve, a hybrid model will work best. You can integrate both strategies intelligently and get each one’s benefits as per your situation and requirements. Dividing your budget and using both the techniques as a hybrid will help you bring traffic to your site in the short term and boost your online presence for long-term success.
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