By continuing to use our website, you consent to the use of cookies. Please refer our cookie policy for more details.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay Per Click (PPC)?

Apr 09, 2012

4 minute read

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) both are two different methods for driving traffic to website. SEO is the process of making changes to your website and improving your website visibility on various search engines. On the other hand, PPC is the form of advertising, where you select keywords for which you would like your business to display on search engine result page (SERP).

Search Engine Optimization Vs Pay Per Click

Difference between SEO and PPC:

Factors	SEO	PPC
Time frame	Takes several months to get ranked.	You’ll appear at the top almost immediately.
How you pay	You pay someone (like us) a fixed or monthly fee to get you ranked.	You pay Google for each click on your ad to appear at the top.
Long Term costs	A bit more costs up front, but usually much less long-term	A bit less cost up front, but usually much more long-term.
Targeting	Targeting is little trickier, especially geographical targeting, with SEO.	You can easily hit your target audience by using the proper keywords and ad copy.
Traffic potential	SEO has higher traffic potential.	PPC has lower traffic potential than the SEO.
Flexibility	Keywords are targeted and required commitment.	Keywords can easily be changed or added.
Techniques	Page optimization (title tag, meta tags, and content optimization), link building, social media involvement, traffic analysis.	Keyword selection and updating, ad text creation and updating, bid management.
Level of control	Search engine controlled – search engine use algorithm to sort web pages according to relevance.	Individual controlled – you determine the keywords, budgets restrictions, and landing pages.
Return of investment	Increasing return – traffic will increase at no additional cost as page of your site gain increased visibility in the organic search result for highly searched keywords.	Proportion result – the traffic you receive will be proportional to the amount invested.
Predictability	Ranking can change quickly as search engine algorithms change or Competition increases. Results are unpredictable.	Results are predictable.

SEO and PPC landing pages are also different. SEO optimized pages should be informative, supplying the visitor the answer to the question which spurred the search. PPC optimized pages should be “sales type”. For more information, please visit http://www.seo.com/blog/marketing-blog/coming-in-for-a-landing-page/ How PPC can help your SEO? PPC is the best Keyword Research Tool for SEO – Through PPC campaigns you can test hundreds and thousands of keywords for dozens of clients in few weeks and find out quickly which keywords and keywords variations may work well for your landing pages. Since PPC let you do precise keyword targeting (by letting you select geo-location, language, network & devices to display your ads on) its results are pretty accurate. PPC campaigns can have direct impact on the website organic traffic. Often people who click on the ads return to a site via organic branded search. I have found a considerable increase in organic brand searches through prolonged PPC campaigns. According to the Google research, we still need to buy search ads. Google’s research folks covered this topic back in July of last year; it concluded that paid search ads give us an 89% incremental lift in site visitors, incremental traffic you would normally get from your organic listings. For more details please visit http://searchengineland.com/google-research-yes-you-still-need-to-keep-buying-search-ads-115037 Use SEO and PPC together:

PPC: Launch campaign, get initial feedback.
SEO: Target PPC keywords, generate long tail traffic.
PPC and SEO: Analyze data to scale PPC campaign, Better SEO results.

There are many ways by which PPC can help SEO:

Branding – The more times your website appears, the more likely people are to recognize it and establish trust with your brand.
GEO location control – This allows you to target ads to certain locations.
Quickly gathered data – Since SEO takes time to kick in, PPC is immediate and the data available helps online marketers to develop long term strategies.

SEO or PPC – Which suits you better??? Actually, it depends on your budget. If your budget permits you, then you should choose PPC first. If you have both time and money, SEO is for you. In fact best marketing strategy is to choose both SEO and PPC. Try opting PPC for fast and immediate results and also keep in mind SEO for long term effectiveness. When to Use PPC? If your organic rankings suddenly take a dive due to the change in search engine algorithm and you don’t have a PPC campaign, you may find yourself suddenly invisible in the search engine results pages. Granted, you can start PPC at any time, but if you aren’t familiar with it, it can take some time to figure out the most effective PPC strategy for your site. If you only focus on paid listings, you are missing out on the traffic that goes to organic rankings. There are two periods when high PPC spend is justified – at the start of a web campaign when there is zero organic traffic, and in Year 3 onward when the site should be able to stand on its own two feet. In the interim periods, sufficient funds must be allocated to organic traffic generation and site improvements. Results:

As shown in this graph, With PPC you can get fast results. Once your ads are set up, people will immediately start seeing them when they query the corresponding keywords. On the other hand SEO offers a better financial value than PPC. Once you have achieved a first page ranking, there is no additional cost to stay there.