What's best for your website? SEO or PPC?
As a business owner looking to attract the maximum traffic to your website you’re probably exploring your options for on-line marketing.
Among the most common on-line marketing strategies that are likely to come up are SEO and PPC. You’ll probably have questions regarding which is more suitable for your business? What is the difference between these two, and how do they work to get visitors onto your website? Let’s take a look…
Understanding SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an organic on-line marketing method that aims to get a website ranking naturally high in search engine results. This is achieved by undertaking numerous on-site activities such as creating and publishing relevant and informative content on a website complete with important keywords and key phrases. SEO activities also include off-site ones, such as creating quality links back to a website from other websites. Fingers crossed, through these on-site and off-site activities, search engines will score a website better, which means better rankings.
Understanding PPC
PPC, or Pay-Per-Click is in short buying advertising space with Google. You’ll have noticed when you search on Google for a product or service the listings marked as ‘Ad’ on the top and bottom of the search results pages. These are PPC adverts that businesses have paid Google for. The way it works is that a business chooses key words or phrases that they want their advert to be found under on the first page of the search results. When a potential customer clicks on the advert the business pays Google a fee. This fee varies greatly depending on how competitive a the keyword or phrase is.
Which is a Better Option? SEO or PPC?
Both marketing strategies have several pros and cons, and you should consider them in detail before making your choice. Let’s talk about them…
SEO is a long-term on-line marketing strategy where good ranking results may take many weeks to achieve SEO activities, both on-site and off-site must be continued to maintain results. PPC is an instant strategy. You pay for the campaign and receive top positions on result pages.
SEO is likely to get you higher-quality traffic with visitors who are looking to buy products and services. Users instinctively trust top-ranking websites because they rely on search engines to present them with credible and the best of options available out there. When it comes to PPC, many people disregard the top listed ‘Ads’ because they know that businesses have paid to be in those top slots.
Both SEO and PPC on-line marketing strategies come at a price. As mentioned above, SEO activities can take considerable time to achieve results, and then constant work to maintain those results. And with PPC, unless the marketing campaign is managed correctly, funds to pay for ‘clicks’ can quickly evaporate, and once the funds of gone the advert disappears.
Often the case a combination of both SEO and selective PPC on-line marketing will work well together to gain good exposure to potential customers.
