Navigating the world of online search can be daunting. Search engines are like vast warehouses, storing and organizing tons of information with the manager —the search engine algorithm—retrieving the right result for every search. Yet, with billions of data collected to present these results, simply having a website may not be enough to rank at the top of the results page.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertisements have become valuable strategies to navigate the search landscape. By utilizing them, you can increase your business’s chance of appearing for the right searches. However, there’s no correct answer when deciding between SEO or PPC. What’s more important is to know when to use one or the other. This article will provide a comprehensive guide, so you can better decide which is the right fit for you: SEO or PPC.
The Search Landscape
Before you even consider SEO or PPC, it’s important to understand what search engines are and how they function. After all, you can’t optimize something without understanding how it works.
Search engines are databases of every piece of content on the web. The primary objective of a search engine is to provide the best and most relevant results for users.
Search engines have two types of results:
- Organic results (SEO)
- Paid results from advertisers (PPC)
These results can appear in formats like:
- Ads
- Knowledge panels
- Featured snippets
- Maps
- Images/videos
- Top stories
- Carousels
- Search tools
Google has a complete breakdown on how these formats appear in search results and how to influence how your website appears.
Every search engine has a specific, secret formula for how it matches, ranks, and presents results for a search query. And those formulas are constantly changing. That’s why it’s important to consistently update your content and keep a pulse on what search engines are looking for over time.
It’s important to remember that even though search results can be complex, there are abundant opportunities for your site to appear at the right time and place.
SEO: An Investment in Long-Term Growth
SEO, in short, is optimizing how your site ranks on search engines. Search engines rank your site based on performance, relevance, experience, and authority. By utilizing SEO, you can see growth in your website’s organic traffic. You don’t have to pay to appear at the top of organic search results – you only have to dedicate the time and resources to making your content relevant and authoritative (more on that later in the article).
There are a lot of components that go into SEO. To make it simple, here are the 5 basics of SEO.
- Keyword research: To be successful with SEO, strategic planning with keywords is required. To best plan, think about what your target audience is typically searching for, identify what you would want to rank for, and if those words are relevant to your business.
- Content creation: Content creation is a big factor in SEO. To create SEO-friendly content, you need to think about the search intent and why someone searched that keyword.
- Transactional: Are they looking to purchase a product or service?
- Informational: Want to learn more about a topic?
- Commercial: Want to know what the best product to purchase is?
- Navigational: Seeking to go directly to a site?
- On-page SEO: This involves everything you can do directly on your site to improve visibility and relevance to search queries. Key things to look at are meta tags, URL structure, accessibility, mobile-friendliness, page load speed, and image optimization.
- Link building: Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks from other sites to your own. Backlinks signal authority, credibility, and popularity to your website. This can be done through guest blogging, content promotion, and participation in industry forums.
Pro tip: LinkedIn is one of the best places to earn backlinks!
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO involves the crawlability, indexability, and overall performance of your site. This makes it easier for the bots that run search engines to find, understand, and store the content on your site. If the search engine can’t do this, your site won’t appear in the search results.
SEO can be overwhelming at the start, but luckily there are free resources available on Semrush, Moz, Google, and more that can help you.
Pros of SEO
Since most people click one of the first search results, higher rankings will lead to higher volumes of consistent traffic. On mobile devices, the average click-through for the top 3 searches is over 45%.
SEO also allows you to build brand awareness and credibility over time. By creating the right content, you can reach your audience at all stages in the buying process, from problem identification to decision-making.
Cons of SEO
A downfall of SEO is that it can require a large time investment. It takes 4 to 12 months to see a real change in search rankings, and search algorithms are subject to change at any moment. To stay aligned with the current algorithms, your site must be updated regularly. In addition, newer brands can have a hard time competing with well-established brands.
PPC: Instant Visibility with Targeted Results
PPC ads are ads that you pay for your site to appear on the search engine results page for specific keywords or phrases. The fee you pay is incurred when someone clicks the ad.
Algorithms for PPC ads take the following into account:
- Bid amounts
- Relevance of the ad to the keyword
- Quality of the ad
- PPC strategy and campaign planning
A successful PPC strategy involves defining target audiences, setting clear goals, doing keyword research, monitoring, and testing.
Pros of PPC
With proper targeting, PPC can lead to quality leads and gain a significant ROI from your efforts. They can produce faster results than organic rankings and are easier to control, but the key here is being effective and strategic. Not every industry is ideal for PPC, but those that are a good fit can see big results.
Cons of PPC
A con of PPC is that paid search traffic disappears once you stop paying. PPC also requires a time investment to ensure ads are optimized and improved to get the best results. If not, costs can add up quickly, preventing you from seeing that ROI. PPC advertising is also built on a bidding system, making popular keywords more expensive and difficult to compete for.
When should I use SEO and/or PPC?
As mentioned previously, there is no right or wrong choice; it’s all dependent on your goals. Here are some common scenarios to help you decipher when to use SEO, PPC, or both.
Case 1: Your business is new to digital marketing, and you have a tight budget
Answer: SEO. By implementing SEO, you can start building brand authority online for free by adding content to your site. This is best done through a regularly updated resource (aka blog) section.
Case 2: You’re launching a new product and want immediate visibility
Answer: PPC. PPC allows for you to get in front of your target audience faster than SEO. Therefore, your product will appear more prominently, even if the user is not aware of your brand yet.
Beware: if you have limited content or optimization on your site already, PPC’s effects can be limited. That’s why we always recommend building a resource library early on, so PPC can be an effective option later.
Case 3: You’re seeing higher search traffic for broader keywords
Answer: Both. This is a great scenario to implement both SEO and PPC into your marketing strategy. Through a combination of high-search traffic, targeted keywords in content, and PPC, you can be at the top of searches and build credibility.
Next Steps
Successfully dominating the search landscape involves understanding SEO and PPC to best utilize each one. The decision of which to use is entirely dependent on your goals and situation, whether it’s long-term growth or instant visibility. ADV Marketing can work with you to develop a digital marketing strategy to best promote your business, reach out to us for more information.
