If you’re confused about which marketing strategy is best for you – SEO or PPC, you’re in the right place.

This SEO VS PPC article will clear all your doubts. 

It will tell you what SEO and PPC are, their pros and cons, & which technique is better for your business.

So keep reading until the end and know which marketing technique will win you more traffic.

SEO vs. PPC Overview

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of optimizing your website majorly via content creation.

This optimization allows you to rank on search engines like Google and Bing, thus improving your website’s search visibility.

It’s said that Google uses about 200 ranking factors to decide which website/webpage should rank on top for a particular keyword.

Therefore, SEO is more of a marathon than a race; you need to be consistent and optimize every small element of your website.

What is PPC?

Unlike SEO, PPC (pay-per-click) is more of a 100-meter sprint.

As the name suggests, in PPC, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad link. 

In plain English – you’re buying traffic for your website.

When doing PPC, you don’t need to be consistent for months. 

The ad campaigns you run give you promising results in 2 to 3 weeks (maybe less).

According to Google’s chief economist Hal Varian’s assumption, businesses generally make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 spent on Google Ads.

But bear in mind this doesn’t mean every ad campaign is a success and will bring you profit.

2 major differences between SEO & PPC

#1. SERPs placement 

Whenever you search anything on Google, a result page with several links appears. This page is the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

The top four and bottom three results you see on this page are PPC results. They’re marked as ‘Ad’ by Google. 

This concept holds true for almost every search engine.

When it comes to SEO, all the results you see in between these PPC links are the websites/web pages optimized for SEO.

#2. Cost-effectiveness

Money is one of the major factors when running a PPC campaign. 

As mentioned earlier, in PPC, you pay for every click your website/webpage link gets. 

On the other hand, SEO is free of cost until you outsource it. But whatsoever, you don’t need to pay the search engine to get traffic. 

It’s all organic!

SEO VS PPC: Which Marketing Technique Is Better for My Business?

SEO VS Google Ads, which is better for your business? Well, it depends on the kind of product/service you sell. 

Different situations call for different marketing techniques. 

Let’s look at some scenarios where SEO and PPC are both winners.

#1. You have a unique product to sell

Imagine if you have a product that’s never been launched in a niche that doesn’t even exist to date. 

For SEO to work, you have to optimize your website for what people are already searching. 

In Other Words: You optimize for keywords that have significant search volume.

When you launch a brand new product in a newly discovered niche, people aren’t aware of it, let alone search for it. 

Creating awareness is the most important thing here. 

To create awareness, push marketing works better than pull marketing. 

Therefore social media or Google ad campaigns are the best in such a situation.

#2. Your marketing technique revolves around a one-time event

Suppose you have a seasonal product, let’s say Halloween costumes. SEO might not be a promising way here.

To build traffic via SEO, you need time. 

So there might be a possibility that Halloween week might come to an end, and your site won’t even start ranking.

What will you do then? Keep doing SEO for next Halloween? 

Sure you could do that, but instead why not just run PPC ad campaigns.

You can start the campaign a week before Halloween and end it at the end of Halloween. That seems to be a smarter approach.

#3. You build a website to sell it in the future

A proper marketing strategy is the key to having a successful flipping business.

When it comes to SEO VS Google Ads, SEO works best for flippers.

Why?

People interested in buying your websites (Prospects) love SEO. 

That’s because they don’t have to actively monitor, run, and invest in ad campaigns.

Another reason is, that once you’ve ranked significant web pages of your website, it takes less effort to manage and rank the website later.

Meaning your prospects won’t have to work as hard as you did to bring in organic traffic.

SEO VS PPC: Pros & Cons

Search engine optimization 

Pros

  • Quality Traffic: Doing quality SEO with consistency means getting quality leads for your website
  • Long Term Traffic: As long as you stay on the top of the search engine for your desired keyword, you keep getting traffic for free and for a long time 
  • Cost-Effective: SEO might require some investment, but it’s nothing compared to PPC campaigns

Cons

  • Time Consuming: It’s no secret that SEO takes time to build a significant amount of traffic 
  • Volatility: Due to algorithmic changes in search engines, there’s a lot of increase and decrease in traffic

Pay per click

Pros

  • Quick Results: Unlike SEO, you can get results with PPC in 2-3 weeks
  • Super Targeted: Target audience at a micro-level, and if done right, the campaign will give you great conversions
  • Analysis: Keep track of all important KPIs like CTR, audience demographics, and conversions

Cons

  • Traffic Is Proportional to Money: The moment you stop financing your campaign, your traffic disappears in thin air
  • Can Be Extremely Expensive: In competitive industries like Insurance, Finance, etc PPC can burn a hole in your pocket

How to Use SEO & PPC In Tandem?

Just because it’s an SEO VS PPC blog doesn’t mean you can’t use them in tandem.

To make the most out of your website, using PPC and SEO hand-in-hand works the best.

Let’s see how to do it the right way.

Leverage SEO to grow traffic & PPC to build awareness

When you have significant organic traffic coming in, why not invest in PPC to make your target audience aware of something.

Let’s say you’re planning to publish a blog post next week; you can run a PPC campaign for the first 2-3 days after you publish the blog.

That’s because Google might take a day or two to index the blog page, and then if the keyword competition is high, it might take time to rank. 

Using this time to bring in traffic (especially from Social media) via ad campaigns might also help you rank organically faster.

Retargeting organic audience via PPC 

Retargeting is a type of advertising with which you can target an audience that has abandoned your website for any reason.

This will help you increase your conversions. Here’s one strategy how to use retargeting:

Suppose you have a tool that needs sign-up. 

Now a person, say Jon, reads about the tools on one of your website’s pages that ranks on top of the search engine organically. 

He thinks it’s perfect for him and signs up immediately.

But due to some reasons, Jon forgets about the tool or plans on using it later.

There will be several people like Jon who’ve given you their mail id but haven’t used the tool.

Now that you have their email ids, you can simply run a retargeting PPC campaign and ask these people if they’re still interested in the tool.

Concluding the SEO VS PPC Battle: Where Should You Invest?

There’s no one winner in the battle between SEO VS PPC. Both are winners. 

You can pick a winner depending on the kind of business you have and the conversion rates you’re looking for. 

But at some point, you will have to use these techniques in tandem to get the best conversion rate.

So if you want to excel online, using both SEO and PPC will give you the most promising results.