Is your business showing up on search engines? Many businesses rely heavily on search engines to generate business. This is particularly the case with industries like e-commerce, travel, financial services and legal services.
If your website isn’t appearing on Google or Bing when customers search for your product or service, you need to do some search engine marketing. But which approach to search engine marketing will get you the results you need? It’s time for a search engine marketing showdown!
In the blue corner, we have SEO (search engine optimization). This involves a variety of tactics such as content creation, keyword placement, link building and website speed optimization in order to encourage webpages to rank high organically.
In the red corner, we have PPC (pay per click). In the context of search engines, this involves paying for your website listing to display as an advert for a select period of time at the top of the results page. The amount of money you pay depends on how many people click on the advert.
Let’s compare the two marketing strategies to see which one is the best solution for you…
Round 1: Cost
SEO
It’s possible to carry out SEO without having to pay a penny. Creating engaging click-worthy content can help you to climb the rankings, and is something some people may be able to do for free. However, DIY SEO is definitely not easy, and many companies find it much more effective to invest in the help of professional SEO services. This can cost anywhere from $500 to $7000 per month depending on the size of your company and how aggressive you want your SEO campaign to be (most small companies will spend no more than $1000 per month).
PPC
There’s no free option when it comes to PPC advertising. With both Google and Bing ads, you get to set a timeframe as to how long you want your advert to display, as well as a minimum daily budget. Google Ads allows you to set a daily budget of as little as $1, but in order to get lots of clicks, you’re going to want to set your daily budget much higher than this. A $20 to $50 daily budget is recommended to get results, which equates to about $600 to $1500 per month providing that people are clicking on your ads.
Winner: SEO wins this round! The option to do your own SEO for free means that it can be more budget-friendly.
Round 2: Speed of results
SEO
SEO requires time to take effect. You need to wait for search engines to crawl and index your webpages, which could take weeks or months. Provided that you are using a range of effective SEO tactics, you will eventually see your rankings improve. However, it’s not always ideal if you need a page to get clicks straight away.
PPC
PPC adverts can start generating leads immediately. As soon as your campaign is launched, your adverts will start showing up in the search engine results whenever someone searches for your targeted keywords. This makes it excellent for advertising upcoming events in the near future or are current limited time deals.
Winner: PPC wins the second round! You may need to patiently wait weeks or months to see results from SEO, whereas PPC will start generating some traffic right away.
Round 3: Long-term ROI
SEO
As a long term strategy, SEO is very effective. Once webpages start ranking more highly and you start getting more visitors, this will only help increase your rankings, as search engine algorithms prioritize webpages that get more traffic. If you stop spending money on SEO, you could also find that you still continue to rank highly for several months. Certain evergreen content may even continue to get clicks without you having to take measures to optimize it further.
PPC
PPC ad campaigns stop giving you traffic the moment a campaign ends. As a result, you need to be continuously spending money on them in order for your adverts to constantly display and keep getting clicks. You can take a break from SEO and still get the benefit from it, but you cannot take a break from PPC and still get leads from it.
Winner: SEO wins the third round. Whereas PPC needs continuous investment to have any results, SEO can sustain itself for a while once you start ranking highly.
Round 4: Targeting
SEO
By creating content specifically aimed at certain audiences and by including certain keywords, you can try to target select consumers using SEO. However, this is not a foolproof method – some keywords can be incredibly competitive, and you may not be able to outrank bigger more established companies. In competitive industries, SEO success often involves doing your research in order to find low competition keywords that other companies haven’t discovered yet. These are typically long-tail keywords made up of multiple words or very obscure terms. This may limit the types of visitors you get.
PPC
PPC advertising platforms allow you to more accurately pinpoint the types of consumers that you want to target. On top of choosing keywords that you’d like your advert to be triggered by, you can select demographics and locations to focus on. In instances where you want to truly filter out certain people, PPC advertising gives you this option. You can further boost yoru results by integrating the best PPC optimization tools for marketers such as keywords lists and ad group shortcut tools.
Winner: PPC advertising wins the fourth round. It provides much more precise targeting and freedom when it comes to keywords.
Overall result: DRAW!
The truth is that SEO and PPC both have their uses. It depends very much on the goal you are trying to achieve. Do you need to quickly advertise something that may not be relevant in a few weeks time? PPC is much more effective in this situation. Are you planning for long-term growth? Investing in SEO could be much more impactful in this case. Many businesses can benefit from spending money on each. Divide your budget between both marketing strategies depending on what your current goal is.