SEO and PPC are both pillars of search engine marketing. Both require a significant investment, but each of them has its benefits in both the short and long term. It is common to see marketers confused between the two whenever they are planning a search engine marketing strategy.
While some may lean towards PPC, others may prefer SEO. To help you make the right decision, have a look at the advantages of each.
SEO:
- The end goal of SEO is generating high-quality traffic.
- The costs involved in SEO include the costs of creating quality content and promoting it.
- SEO is a long-term process, and it can take months or even years to get your website to rank at the top in the Search Engine Rankings Pages (SERPs).
- The biggest advantage of SEO is that it is sustainable. Once you’ve reached the top, you can sustain without much effort or investment.
- Every SEO strategy is unique, and it isn’t easy to copy it.
- Search rankings are easily affected by changes in search engine algorithms.
- Doesn’t help in garnering high traffic within a short duration.
- The #1 position on SERPs gets a CTR of about 30%.
PPC:
- Just like SEO, the end goal of PPC is that of generating traffic.
- The main costs involved in PPC are for creating the content, creating the ad copy, and running the campaign.
- The best part about PPC marketing is that you can see the results almost immediately.
- As you need to pay for every click, it is impossible to sustain the PPC campaigns without continuous investment.
- Your ad copy is visible to everyone and so is your SEO title. This makes it very easy for others to rip-off your strategy.
- For every $1.60 that marketers invest in PPC, they can generate a revenue of $3.
While PPC ads perform exceptionally well in the short-term, SEO is a long-term strategy. If you have a flash sale coming up soon, you should use PPC. This will ensure that the ad is seen by every person who searches for the relevant keywords.
In such a case, SEO would take ages to rank and reach your desired audience. Additionally, through PPC ads, you can directly get the searchers to your landing pages and encourage them to purchase from you.
SEO is extremely helpful when it comes to increasing your brand awareness and sales in the long run. When your website ranks at the top in SERPs, it’ll improve your brand recognition and help you stand out against your competition. This increase in brand recognition can help improve the CTR of your PPC ads as well.
This makes it essential to have a strategy that combines both PPC and SEO to get the best of both worlds. To learn more about them, you can check out this infographic by SpyFu
About Author:-
Zac Harris is the Director of SEO at SpyFu. He is passionate about scaling companies and testing all things SEO.