SEO vs PPC | Which One Is Better For Your Business

When it comes to digital marketing, or when you are starting, there is a common question about SEO vs PPC. How do they work? What are the advantages and disadvantages of both? The most important, what is better, SEO or PPC?

In general, PPC brings immediate results but it costs much money, on the other end, SEO takes time to provide results but it is free… the truth is that it is more than you may expect. We’ll clarify everything below and make you understand both terms.

This article won’t show only advantages or disadvantages to choosing one over another, but it will assist you to make clear which are week and strong points of both promotion methods.

In the final thoughts, you are better off using a mixture of SEO and PPC. We’ll let you know exactly why, so keep the focus on reading.

Advantages And Disadvantages of SEO

SEO is growing more and more quickly, especially it is popular in startups. Everyone is looking for an optimized website that ranks well, because, in their minds, it is free of cost. By the way, if you have been in business for some tenure, you know very well, time = money. This is not just a line, it’s true.

However, SEO might be considered a cheaper process of optimizing your products or website, than may be far from the matter, depending on the niche you are in & the hardest of your competition. SEO involves high-quality content that is not free to create.

Have a look at the Pros and Cons of SEO to better understand what you are dealing with when you get started.

SEO Pros:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) covers the largest section of search marketing. SEO is just like planting seeds of a forest. You perform SEO and see the results later in the future. However, you can speed up the work to get results soon that requires a lot more tasks done than just installing the CMS and writing high-quality content.

1- It is free if you do it yourself:

If you know SEO and are prepared to continuously improve your knowledge and invest much time in writing your content, then there possibilities to rank high without any investment.

2- Long term results

If you do work consistently for about 6 months to 1 year, in this way, the results you get will last for a long time. It is a nice idea to improve and update content time by time though. Importantly if something better shows up in SERPs. On the other end, if you keep sharing your website’s content here and there, chances are you will keep your ranking.

3- Good ROI

If you follow the free path & do everything yourself, SEO has the surety to bring the results, especially when you are dealing with local business, where competition is less. Even using PPC for your services, assuming to get rank on a high volume keyword, you can get up to 20 times the number of clicks. Top organic results can bring 25% of the organic results for a keyword. On the other end, paid ads can get only 2-3%.

SEO Cons

1- It takes time to see results

For someones, 6 months to one year may sound pretty, but for others, it may sound like an eternity. Everyone’s try is to see results and see fast. For this, it is a good idea to put all basics of SEO as soon as you begin. Remember again, SEO takes time to see results, so the sooner you work hard and apply SEO best practices, the sooner you will see results. And, if you postpone SEO, you will hear the 6 months story again.

2- High uncertainty

Google algorithms are updated time by time. It means that for any reason, at any time, your website may drop from its ranking, even be removed from search indexing. It only happens whenever you are involved in black hat SEO. if you are updated with the latest Google updates, you will be fine with website ranking.

3- Hard to scale

If you are working alone on your website’s SEO and getting things to the next level is not easy. If you don’t post necessarily have to post more and more to get more organic traffic, but it is also true that if you post more, you get more traffic. You alone can do so many things in 24 hours. Scaling that needs help, includes money and many other things. However, if you are thinking to build a high-authority website and require hundreds of articles per month, editors, and a content marketing team then results will be shown.

When Should You Choose SEO?

Unless you purposely don’t need to be on search engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, simply apply, for everyone. For this, you should start working on it as soon as possible, because it takes time for it to get organic traffic. In a short briefing, the SEO planning should be adopted before building the website, if you take structure and platform into account.

Advantages & Disadvantages of PPC

In the end, we have Pay Per Click (PPC) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Some SEO experts blame it for being efficient and high costing way more than SEO. by the way, those claims may be false due to bias. The reality is PPC would be a great method of promoting your services/products, especially when you’re selling a product or an eCommerce store.

PPC Pros

Usually, most people think of PPC as regular advertising, but it’s much more than that. Having a chance to show an ad only when someone searches a target keyword and, pay for it only when they click, is priceless. There are several good things about PPC to discuss here.

1- Instant Results

The ever good thing about PPC is that you can track results instantly. This is only when your landing page is decent. Here, you are required to have a call to action button or contact form. Based on the competition, you will have to pay more. However, some other possibilities could be taken into consideration, like the quality of content and title. Either way, ranking in the top 5 results with SEO is impossible to achieve.

2- Scale-Up Quickly

Scaling-up in Google Adwords is pretty simple and sounds good. Just pay money and get results. Two ways of paying money are popular. The 1st one is to target more keywords. The 2nd one is simply adjusting your daily or weekly budget to over 9.000 & become overpower. Then, your competition will be very frustrated.

3- No Uncertainty

The biggest advantage of PPC is you don’t have to fear any Google updates. In the field of PPC, the updates are upfront and not secret. Just, you also spend between 5-15 minutes to set up an ad and another 5-10 minutes to detect if they have been approved or not. More, you will also know exactly what is allowed and what isn’t.

PPC Cons

Like with anything in the world, there must also be cons. PPC has very few, but it depends on who you are and how you do, some might not even seem to be cons. If you have a high-profit budget like you can afford to pay ads. However, if you only get a profit of $2 but you pay $1.5 to get it, it might not such a pretty deal, especially after taxes.

1- You pay for every click

For each click that you get, you will have to pay either you get sales or not. So as long as you get profit from it, the more you invest the more you earn. For this, you need to think in CTR (Click Through Rate). If you invested for 100 clicks and CTR is only 1%, then it is sure that you are wasting your money.

2- Lower ROI

We discussed earlier, SEO results are slow but last for a longer time. It is the exact opposite of PPC. The ROI (Return on Investment) on PPC (Pay Per Click) is determined short term, by subtracting how much you invest on paid search ads from how much you earn by selling your products/services. Whenever you stop paying, you stop showing ads so the ROI won’t grow in the same way it does with SEO, long term.

3- Growth is tied to budget

PPC (Pay Per Click) is tied to the budget, although it is simple to scale. Again, it means if you are looking for more sales, you will also have to pay more for PPC. however, it doesn’t sound so bad, but assuming that growth often involves other expenses like personnel, better servers, or even warehouses, you will always be short on money.

When Should You Choose PPC?

When Should You Choose PPC?

All the time, you can use PPC. if you are a startup and have a little bit of budget then it is suitable to use PPC. the boost can assist you to keep the business going up as well as growing your organic visitors.

You can’t rank for all the keywords even if you are already established. In this way, you can pay for those keywords on which you aren’t ranked but those are worth for your earning. Also, you can use PPC on keywords that are already ranked to increase your CTR (Click Through Rate). If you any keyword on position 5, then why not have position 1 or 2?

Conclusion

As you have seen, both PPC and SEO are good methods on their ends to market your products. Now it depends on you how do you deal with PPC or SEO. Both provide results but PPC does instant but SEO takes time.

Have you ever tried one of both terms? What is your experience? Which one brought the best results for you? Let us know your opinion in the comment section.