As long as SEO and PPC exist it will be a hot topic for discussions. We don’t consider social media, email campaigns as the main source of traffic in this article. Depending on the goals, both SEO and PPC will show great results, and what is more important - both of them require investment. Let’s start to discover the digital marketing world which is full of opportunities and talk about SEO and PPC: which is better for your business, pros, and cons, how to be smart about these marketing strategies.
What is SEO
SEO is the synonym of “organic” or “natural” or “absolutely free” traffic that goes to your website. Search Engine Optimization is something that each website owner heard at least once. The main disadvantage of SEO that it works in the long run. So, please take off your pink glasses, it can take up to 6 months to see the first impressive results of a successful SEO campaign. But all your efforts will be paid off, once you reach the highest rankings you can get more traffic for free and it will last for as long as your competitors ignore the necessity to invest in SEO as well. But, there always room for improvement for websites even with 1M organic monthly visitors. As an example, you can take the most competitive keyword for your website. Let’s say it has about 50000 monthly searches. You’ve completed website optimization in accordance with the best SEO practice and reached Top-5. Let’s say that only 20% of your target audience will click your link. 20% from 50000 is 10000. 10K potential clients for free. Sounds promising, right?
One more argument in favor of SEO is that if you know how to do SEO or you’re interested to learn how to do this properly and have time and strong desire to discover the SEO universe, optimization campaign will cost you 0 in terms of money spent and a lot in terms of time. You can delegate this task to the SEO professional, who will do everything in accordance with the best SEO practices, so finally, you will see how the number of visitors grows and the number of sales increases. Read our guide, how to hire an SEO specialist.
What is PPC
Pay-per-Click - can bring clients to your website right away you’ve started your campaign. Yes, that’s true: you launched the website, set up ads, and just wait for calls and orders. Sounds too good to be true, right? Reality is a bit different: setting ads properly is real science. If you missed some details, don’t be surprised that your budget was just spent for nothing.
If you want your ads to convert well, do detailed research first. Discover, who your target audience is, what is the age range, interests, how your goods can help your potential customers, how they can look for the services you offer. When you’re done with detailed answers for all those questions, you can press the “Publish ad” button. The problem with PPC is that no one can guarantee that you will achieve the desired results, that it’s not your competitors will click on your ads or used bots to do this. This phenomenon is known as “Click fraud”. Last, but not the least, bid price, especially for highly competitive niches.
I know that’s obvious, but don’t forget to do proper calculations in advance.
SEO or PPC: which is better for my business?
You should try both! Here is the answer. SEO is the best strategy for online business in the long run. Do proper On-Page SEO for your website, to be honest, you need to do this only once, keep your website updated and the results may last for several years, of course, if you’re planning to develop your business and it’s not a one-time project.
PPC can bring additional customers to your website on normal days and especially when it comes to holidays like Christmas, New Year, Valentine’s Day and etc. Another PPC great advantage is that you don’t have to take care of how search engines see your website, how good it is and etc, which can’t be said about SEO.
Our Experience
I can’t lose this opportunity to share a personal experience with PPC campaigns. We tried to create them for informational and service websites. Have we received any qualified leads? Absolutely not. The reason might be a low budget plus COVID-19 that put a spoke in the wheels as we’ve been trying to promote a travel-related website and services that were quite popular before the pandemic started. Anyways, it was kind of a test and we didn’t plan to invest a lot.
Have we faced with Click Fraud? YEEES. First clicks… they were so promising. But when we checked Google Analytics the bounce rate for all paid campaign visitors was 100% and some sort of desperation has come.
This test continued for one week, not seeing any results we decided that it’s better to invest in SEO at this point.
Are we going to try PPC one more time? Yes, but we need to get prepared and prepared well.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for SEO assistance, feel free to leave us a message.