PPC vs SEO: The Key Facts

The term “Digital Marketing” encompasses a wide range of activities. PPC and SEO are among the most talked-about and among the most common things we are asked about as Digital Marketers. Which is better? And which is the best for your business? This blog will help you to answer both of these questions while discussing the benefits of each and aid you in deciding which one you need.

Here we can see two search results for Tile & Stone Gallery. The top is a Google ad with site links to various pages on Tile & Stone Gallery’s website and a location extension for the nearest showroom. The second search result is organic and simply shows the URL and brief description of the location of the business/website.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of increasing traffic to your website through organic search engine results. You might now be thinking to yourself, “thanks for that, but what does this mean??”. In order to fully understand both PPC and SEO, you have to think about your own behaviours as a customer and consumer. For example, when you need to buy a pair of trainers and are looking to find reviews on a specific pair you’re interested in, or if you were on holiday looking for the best restaurants nearby where would you look? The answer to this most of the time for most people is that you would use your phone or computer to carry out a simple search on Google. E.g. “Nike Vapor Max review”, “How comfortable are Nike Vapormax”, “best steak restaurant Marmaris”, “Italian food in Marmaris near Amira hotel”, you would then scroll through these millions of results to find the one that you feel is best suited to you. But out of all of those millions of results, what makes those links on the first few pages of your Google search so special, why are they amongst the top results out of so many potential millions of results and what can you do to get your business amongst the top- this is where SEO comes in.

“Content is King”- Bill Gates 

SEO can help you improve your rankings in search engines. Coming up on the first page of Google search results has a massive influence on page views, conversions and other key performance indicators. Google’s organic results are based on how relevant your page is to the search terms used by users who are searching for your page. The phrase “content is king” famously used by Bill Gates, sums up the importance of good quality content in the digital marketing world and SEO. By writing good quality and relevant content and implementing keyword targeting you can improve the rankings of your pages on google search results. However, SEO strategies are highly time-consuming (time is money) and very slow-burning, it often takes months to see results.

An alternative to SEO is PPC. PPC (pay-per-click) as a marketing strategy is ads that you pay for in a search engine. With Google, paid ads appear at the very top of a search. With paid ads, you can add extensions such as site links, locations, calls and much more. Each of these extensions carries their own benefits, making PPC highly versatile and effective. With paid ads you will only pay when a user clicks on your ad, you do not pay when your ad shows. Paid ads can include search ads or display ads. Paid ads allow for targeting users based on location, user activity, demographic targeting and much more. While SEO is slow-burning, PPC is instant and affords laser-like targeting. Get your ads seen by the people you want to see your ads. Set a daily/monthly budget to suit your business and perform A/B testing with a number of different ads to see which ones perform the best. PPC affords so much flexibility and choice but requires a regular stream of money to keep running.

Stringer’s world take advantage of PPC and call extensions.

The cost of PPC and where your ad shows or even if it shows at all is dependant on a number of factors. For small businesses it is very difficult to match the big players with SEO, however, with PPC it is possible for small businesses to make ads that rank just as well or even better than the big corporations.

In an ideal world you would adopt an integrated approach that harmoniously makes use of PPC and SEO strategies, however, in a world where money and time are short, for most small and medium-sized business I suggest that time and money is best spent on PPC. The laser-sharp precision of PPC targeting, the flexibility of budgeting and the options of remarketing, display and search marketing sets it apart from SEO. At WDL we have worked with numerous large, medium and small businesses on building highly successful PPC campaigns and have achieved results that speak for themselves. Having seen some incredible growth directly from PPC I can confidently choose PPC over SEO purely for the immense achievements we have witnessed in our clients, consistently setting targets which we continue to break, setting new benchmarks for growth with our PPC results.

Get in touch with us today for a chat if you are interested in discussing how PPC and SEO can help your business and to find out more about some of the projects we have worked on and how we can give your business a boost.