Kahl Orr is the Founder of Rise Marketing, a marketing agency that builds high-performing websites and SEO campaigns for fast-growing brands.
Whenever a customer goes online to research a product or a service or to simply make an online purchase, the journey often starts with a search engine, such as Google Search or Bing. Google Search alone processes over 90,000 inquiries per second worldwide, with more than 50% of consumers using Google to search for and purchase products and services online.
This underscores the importance of an adequately developed digital marketing strategy. Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are two marketing strategies that share the same goal: to bring more traffic to your webpage and thus help increase your revenue.
In this guide, we’ll discuss the differences between PPC and SEO, their unique advantages and drawbacks, and provide you with insight on how to transition from paid advertising to organic traffic.
Defining SEO and PPC
Search engine result pages are separated into two distinct categories: organic and paid search results. Paid results are almost exclusively displayed at the top of the search engine results pages, with organic results ranking beneath them. We’ll explain why this is happening in a bit, but for now, let’s get acquainted with SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization and refers to a process of improving your website to increase its visibility and positioning in search engine results pages (SERP). The better visibility and ranking your website has, the more likely it’s going to be positioned higher on the SERP, which is important because the top three organic search results capture around 60% of all clicks.
A comprehensive SEO strategy focuses on competitive keyword research, high-quality content creation, link building and backlinks, technical SEO, meta description, and landing page optimizations.
Optimizing all of these aspects of your website aims to increase your domain authority and help you increase your rating in organic results. This positively affects your online presence, brand awareness, and conversion rates.
What is PPC?
PPC advertising, also known as paid search advertising or PPC ads, is independent of organic listings. These ads are paid for by businesses to rank higher than organic results for a specific search term or a specific keyword.
These are often at the top of SERP, separated by a gray “Ad” symbol in front of the page name. The symbol signifies that a business is paying Google to position its webpage at the top of SERP. These rankings, unlike organic ones, are based on the amount of money (cost per click) a business or an advertiser is willing to pay for a single visit.
These ads offer great flexibility, as they allow businesses to make real-time changes to their target audience, budget strategy, marketing budget, and ad copy. It’s worth noting that an effective PPC campaign offers immediate results, but it’s often not the most cost-effective search engine marketing campaign.
SEO Pros and Cons
All the optimizations implied by an effective SEO strategy take time, and it’s often said that SEO isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. Admittedly, SEO costs time and money, but compared to PPC, SEO is significantly more cost-effective.
That’s because the content and link-building you’ve done continue to attract organic traffic, which signals to Google that your thematic relevance and domain authority is high. More importantly, after the initial costs, the generated traffic comes at zero costs per click.
What makes SEO great is that it relies on more than one marketing funnel, and you can create different kinds of content, including blog posts, guides, case studies, and social media, allowing you to meet your target audience across various online platforms.
Organic search is more stable, as it has no off-and-on switch, and it doesn’t automatically turn off if you stop paying. Think of it as owning your traffic; it will keep going as long as you maintain it. However, the main downside of SEO is that it takes time to produce results, and it does require maintenance in terms of producing fresh content and adhering to any Google algorithm changes.
PPC Pros and Cons
Unlike SEO, PPC is a sprint; if SEO is owning traffic, PPC marketing is akin to renting it. Your PPC campaign can often produce near-immediate results, and it’s often significantly less time-consuming to set up and execute.
Additionally, your PPC efforts will appear above organic rankings, which enhances your online visibility and directs plenty of search traffic, especially for products and services you offer. Ad campaigns also allow you to pinpoint your target audience with higher accuracy, thanks to the versatility of Google Ads, and perform A/B testing with unparalleled speeds.
However, PPC strategies only work as long as you pay per click, which means that you can’t actually use PPC without money, and if your marketing budget happens to dry up, so does your traffic. This adversely affects your profit margins.
SEO vs. PPC: Which Is Better?
The choice between SEO and PPC is situational, and both marketing methods should be part of your marketing strategy. PPC is great for businesses that want quick results or to promote a novel product, while SEO is more practical for those with a more constrained budget who are looking to build their brand authority and maximize long-term return on investment.
Ultimately, your best bet is to rely on both: use PPC for retargeting ads and to promote your SEO-driving content. In fact, PPC is excellent for boosting your SEO efforts, which is why you shouldn’t transition from PPC to SEO-only, at least until you’ve reached undisputable domain authority and your brand has reached worldwide recognition.
Summary
PPC advertising is great if you’re new on the market and you’re looking to spread your brand awareness fast. However, its pricing can drain your marketing budget, which is why PPC is best used to drive your SEO efforts and develop enough domain authority and relevance to minimize the use of PPC and offset some of its costs.