Here at Social Loop, we pride ourselves on our accessible approach to digital marketing services – cutting through the buzzwords and exploring each of our services in a way that our clients understand.
In this blog post, we’re looking at two primary approaches to digital marketing for your website, comparing them and considering the benefits of each as both individual and integrated strategies.
Without further ado, what is SEO and how does it compare to PPC?
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it refers to the process of improving a website to ensure that it performs well within the organic results of search engines such as Google.
A website which has been optimised effectively can benefit from receiving continuous, relevant traffic from search engines and this in turn can lead to more sales and enquiries for your business. However there are many things to consider when it comes to SEO - from creating unique content that is deemed to be useful to potential visitors to ensuring any images uploaded are optimised effectively (and much, much more!).
What is PPC?
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click and refers to traffic which is gained through paid ads – with you as the business owner having to pay a fee for every website visitor gained as a result of your ad. In terms of placement of PPC ads, these usually sit above the organic results on search engines such as Google and are therefore typically noticed first by people making an online search.
The benefits of SEO
The first and most obvious benefit of SEO is that it can result in a 'free' source of traffic -in the sense that you don't pay directly for your website to show up in the search results. But in order to get a website to perform well from an SEO point of view, it can take a lot of time and additional resources which may come at a cost.
While this does inevitably mean that SEO is more of a long-game approach to building your online presence, the way that an SEO strategy boosts the quality of your website and online presence, and the reputation it can help you to build as a brand, means that it is favoured as a win-win investment for business and website owners.
Beyond that, SEO is a sustainable approach to online marketing which only gets better with time. While a PPC ad will disappear as soon as you stop paying, once you’ve nurtured your SEO strategy and built a quality content plan, it will continue to deliver.
The benefits of PPC
The benefits of PPC are far more immediate than those gained through a focus on SEO, and so for those websites who want to increase their traffic quickly this is often the best option for growth. The concept of a PPC plan is built on laser-targeted precision in relation to the keywords that you bid on and the way that you create an ad which offers vital information and an enticing USP.
When you run PPC ads, your brand and services or products are seen by the people that you are targeting, increasing the chances of conversion from those who you believe are your clearest target audience. In addition, a PPC campaign is quick and easy to set up (with the right help from a professional agency) and can be scaled upwards within days or weeks, whereas SEO is more of a long game.
With all that said, is it better to choose between SEO and PPC, or opt for a strategy which includes and utilises both?
Individual or integrated approach: our recommendations
There are benefits to both a purely SEO-based strategy and a PPC-exclusive strategy – but when you combine the two and opt for an integrated approach, you inevitably benefit from the broadest possible reach in terms of enticing your existing niche customer group and appealing to wider groups of customers that you may not have considered for your PPC campaign.
PPC in particular can be limiting when it comes to customer outreach and trying to onboard new customers, so combining it with an SEO strategy serves to bolster your presence and keep your brand front of mind for those who know about you already and those who don’t.
Finally, with PPC an integral part of the online marketing world, the presence of an SEO plan lets you transfer those high-cost keywords over to your free strategy – thus reserving the more targeted and niche keywords for ads and driving your marketing costs down without impacting conversion.
SEO vs. PPC
Here at Social Loop, we offer a range of digital marketing services designed to boost your online presence, fine tune your marketing strategy, and support the growth and success of your business. With help available for both a SEO and a PPC plan, and to help you combine the two for optimum success, get in touch with us today.