SEO vs. PPC: Which is Better for Your Business

SEO & PPC – are currently two of the most commonly used digital marketing terms.

Understanding how they are different and comparing them will help you to decide which one is more suitable for your organization.

For this, we’ll start by elaborating what SEO and PPC individually mean and compare them, simultaneously.

SEO vs PPC - A Glance

• The fundamental contrast between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) is that traffic coming from SEO is free and free while traffic generated from PPC isn’t free, as the name infers you need to pay a cost for each click.
• Both SEO and PPC are essential for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which is one of the devices you can use as a component of your general Internet Marketing effort.
• This is additionally the reason why you may once in a while encounter the terms organic search engine listings and paid search engine listings or Paid Search Advertising.
• You know that SEO driven traffic is free and thus, it takes a lot of effort, time and hard work to get free traffic from search engines.
• The competition is intense for almost every keyword you can search for. To find one in the top 5 slots, you really need to have a high-quality website and a great SEO strategy.
• There are no shortcuts. If you don’t know how keywords work or know nothing about SEO, then the best way to get traffic to the website is to employ an SEO expert to do the job for you.

If you need more information about SEO, check out RaSu Creatives’ SEO services.

• The Pay-per-click cost, on the other hand, depends on a variety of other factors.
• For example, if we take the cost per click of advertisement with Google Ads, the most common PPC method depends on the popularity of the keyword, the number of advertisers who want to use the specific keyword, and the number of associated websites that have ad positions for the specific keyword.
• If it sounds a little complex, then it probably is, despite Google’s attempts to make it simpler to use the whole system. The good news with PPC is that you only pay for the clicks and not for the views your ad gets.

For more information about PPC, check out our PPC services.

Let’s dive in deeper to look at the benefits and shortcomings of SEO and PPC. It’ll help you to decide better, which is more suitable for you.

Benefits of SEO:

Mentioned below are some benefits of organic traffic that are driven by SEO. Let’s know them:

1. Awareness: Visibility for your targeted keywords in search engines positions your business in almost the same way in front of potential buyers as if you were to advertise, and it drives brand recognition and awareness.
2. Branding: There can be a positive branding advantage for exposure around commercial search terms and informational requests relevant to your business industry. When customers perform the research that will lead to a purchase, the brand can be identified with and trusted by searchers who ask questions. On a given subject, you can become an authoritative voice.
3. Credibility and Trust: With an audience searching for your services, getting your site back in the organic results will affect your perceived reputation. Most consumers skip ads and trust organic outcomes quite firmly. Being noticeable provides the company with an all-important approval stamp. It can also have more advantages by getting good reviews and credibility signals in place.
4. Website Traffic: With increasing website traffic more opportunities come your way to drive awareness of your business and instruct a probability as to why the customer would buy from you.
5. Cost: SEO will generally be more cost-effective than all other marketing strategies for brand awareness and relevant traffic to your website.

Shortcomings of SEO

Every element has its cons along with the pros. Let’s know where SEO lacks:

1. SEO is Time Taking: The SEO method doesn’t generate instant results. SEO takes a long time to get a website to rank in the top 10 list. SEO might not be a successful strategy if you are looking for a short time impact.
2. SEO Requires Unique Content: For a business, it becomes necessary to invest in something that gives a good return. To rank in the top 10 a website must have unique and SEO-rich content.

You need to hire a content writer, even after that, we can’t evaluate the time it will take to rank at the top of the search engine. So, it is time-consuming and can be too expensive for a small or medium-sized business.

Benefits of PPC

After discussing all the pros and cons of SEO, let’s take about what PPC has to offer for a business on the web, and how. Mentioned below are some benefits of PPC:

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1. Position on Search Page: When we search on Google, we find four ads above the fold on desktop and three on mobile phones. These are the paid ads, they dominate the page. Even if a user scrolls past them, they will still be visible.
2. Brand Visibility: When a paid advertisement is running, the ad is visible to the interested audience. Even if they back off and run through a brand search before clicking the site, that visibility will pay dividends to your marketing.
3. Visual Product Ads: When a user searches for what it wants to buy, Google displays visual shopping ads that are called Product Listing Ads (PLAs). This type of ads improves the click-through rate by providing the feature which organic search fails in.
4. Target: PPC helps a website to mark the audience and bring a laser-targeted way for potential customers. Ads can be targeted by search keywords, geography, language, devices, and audiences based on previous visits.
5. Fast: PPC is fast than the organic method. PPC brings the result within a few days, unlike SEO takes even a month to generate good results.

Why PPC May be Unsuitable

Now after discussing all blooms about PPC, let’s take a look at its downsides as well.

Mentioned below are some cons of PPC:

1. PPC is Expensive: PPC can be too expensive for a competitive industry. You’ll have to keep on investing for your ad to catch eyes and engagement to it.
2. PPC loses Effectiveness: Your ads tend to lose their impact and effectiveness with time, this is called ad fatigue. The longer your ads run, the less effective they become. People see your ads too often that they become monotonous for them. You will need to make new creatives over time which are not cheap to make.
3. Need Money to Make Money: For the PPC method, you will have to have money, to begin with, the campaign and generate more money out of it.

Which One is Better - SEO or PPC?

When we talk about SEO and PPC, it isn’t easy to figure out which one is better for your business. Because, in an ideal world, businesses require both to bring the legitimate source of traffic.

To understand it in detail here are some points to solve this query:

1. Position in Search Results: When we search for a keyword, the result that appears at the top is the PPC ads. Organic results will appear in the middle of the page only, whether your listing will appear at the top of the search position or first page. This depends on how optimized your site is.
2. Traffic Potential: SEO tops at this. SEO results to bring long term and large audience traffic than PPC. As mentioned above, though PPC is a fast method for advertising and bringing traffic but slowly the reach becomes low and makes the ad quite monotonous and stale for the user. SEO brings 24*7 flow of traffic to the search engine without investing anything monetary. Rather PPC requires a cost to top the position and maintain the rank every time, otherwise it will fall down.
3.  Higher Conversion Rate: PPC brings a highly targeted audience that has a huge conversion rate. If your ads are highly optimized then the chances are greater that you may get a good number of conversions than a visitor coming from search.

PPC costs more to generate more conversion rate with highly optimized keywords. PPC results in effective engagements and clicks to your website in the short term of presence on search engine results.

In a Nutshell

Throughout the study, we saw that SEO and PPC are legitimate needs for a business that wants to grow on digital channels. It depends upon how you want to rank yourself. SEO and PPC are a necessary part of your internet marketing campaign and media mix. 

You can use PPC to run a campaign and test which keyword converts better to rank top your website on the search result. Later you can use SEO to rank for those keywords. SEO might take it long to rank your website in the top list of search results, but PPC also fails to bring traffic when you stop paying for clicks.

So it is better that you use both, SEO and PPC simultaneously with a trial and error method. Test and then run the campaign for better results.

If you need consultation or experts to run your campaigns, feel free to reach out to us. Check Out our Case Studies sections on how we nailed PPC and SEO campaigns for our clients.