Blog

How to Decide Between SEO and PPC for Your Website

Many companies remain confused about whether they should choose pay-per-click ads or an organic search engine optimization strategy for building a well-reputed online presence.

Unfortunately, no technique holds superiority over the other and selecting one depends on your demands and condition. Here are some questions whose answers are crucial in deciding which service you should opt:

  1. Is your company selling a new product or service?
  2. Is your website well-reputed in your respective industry?
  3. Do the products/services you sell require a brief introduction or, do you need to educate the customers about the products/services before selling them?

If you find it hard to answer the questions asked above, don’t worry. Learn the benefits and requirements of both PPC and SEO so as to appropriately select a service for you. Let us take a look at what both of these hold in store.

SEO VS PPC
Many people think that SEO is simply optimizing your website and content to rank higher in the search engine result pages. It’s true that SEO aims to make a website rank higher but, this isn’t its sole purpose. SEO is also about being a site with authority in a specific niche. Having a high authority site is a huge responsibility as you have to provide solutions to the customers’ problems not only on your site but on other sites as well.

Helping people out in problems helps your site too, as prominent search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and many others rank those websites highly who do so. All the search engines appreciate a website which has links from authoritative websites, as, these links act as a vote of confidence for your website. As you become an expert in your niche through SEO, you start linking with many such websites. Search engine optimization is always a reliable option which you should include in your long-term web marketing strategy.

The advantage of SEO over PPC is that SEO brings organic traffic to the website. The leads generated through SEO are better and long-lasting. Thus, SEO helps in making a stable and bigger clientele. In fact, many visitors eventually learn to ignore the PPC generated results as they find natural search results more reliable.

The PPC advertisements hold the advantage over organic such results when it comes to improving the ROI (Return On Investment). If you opt for PPC, you can significantly see a rise in the ROI, as genuine search engines do not put the highest bidder on top, but the bidder who would be the best for the customers.

The search engines such as Google appreciate the bidder who provides appropriate solutions to the customers over a bidder willing to pay more so that the visitors can have a better experience on the internet. If the search engines don’t do so, the customers will get dissatisfied and opt for other search engines, which would be disadvantageous for both the search engine as well as the bidders.

SEO only helps your website to rank higher in the SERPs, whereas the PPC advertising not only promotes your website on the SERPs but also on websites related to your niche. So, if a visitor sees your ad and doesn’t click it in the search results, he/she can do so afterward, through the sites he/she surfs on the internet.

Conclusion

Still wondering over what might be the best for your business?

To select one from SEO and PPC is difficult, as both provide a business with unique benefits which no other strategy can ensure.

  • Pay per click advertising campaign is best for kick-starting your business’ digital marketing efforts as you get immediate traffic towards your site. Get all the required training and certification for effective PPC marketing. Google offers training in certification for Google Adwords and Google Analytics, both of which are free for businesses. You can either dedicate your time and resources towards PPC or hire a professional for the task.
  • Search engine optimization is a process that gradually benefits a company. It builds page authority and gets the site indexed for specific keywords. It might take more than a month before you get to see some result. This result further depends on the competitiveness of your market. SEO strategies are best for long-term growth as it brings qualified leads to the website.

No matter what you choose, if you implement a well-researched strategy, both SEO and PPC can get you on the front page of the search engines for targeted terms. So, check out the costs of both packages, compare the needs of your company to the services offered, and then choose the best option for your company.

The New York Times Forbes Enterpreneur Magazine mashable The Wall Street Journal