As digital marketing practices continue to evolve, companies are constantly on the look-out for more effective ways to enhance their online presence and fuel business growth. This is necessary since the competition has intensified, given the ever-increasing number of businesses, and each brand actively pursues success in their own way.
Two of the most popular online marketing strategies are search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search ads. Many people know the latter as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and this is the specific term that you will find many marketers using on a daily basis. Although both of these search engine marketing strategies aim to increase visibility on search engines, they work differently and also have unique strengths and drawbacks.
Understanding the differences between SEO and paid search can help businesses manage their marketing budgets more wisely to achieve their objectives. This guide examines the core aspects of both, explores their respective advantages and disadvantages, and provides guidance on which approach may be most suitable for your business needs.
What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of enhancing a website to improve its organic ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Unlike paid advertising, SEO focuses on attracting visitors through unpaid methods by making the website more appealing to both search engines and users. The goal is to increase the quantity and quality of traffic by ensuring that the site appears higher in search results for relevant queries.
Keyword Research
Keywords, or words and phrases that searchers enter into a search engine, are the foundation of SEO. Understanding what words people use to search for your products or services is vital because your site needs to appear in the search results for the right keywords. That is, what a user is searching for is the same as what you want the search engine algorithms to find on your page.
Effective keyword research targets high-traffic terms and considers the competition level and relevance to ensure that the chosen keywords can drive meaningful traffic to the website.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic. This includes elements like the HTML source code, titles, headings, and meta descriptions. On-page optimization also involves creating high-quality content that is both relevant to your keywords and compelling for your target audience. This could include blog posts, videos, images, or infographics.
Ensuring that each page is well-structured and contains valuable information helps search engines understand the content and rank it appropriately. It’s also important to make sure your website’s technical aspects are in good order. User-friendly design and fast loading times contribute to a positive user experience, which is a key factor in on-page SEO.
Off-Page SEO
On the other hand, off-page SEO involves actions taken outside of your website to improve its authority and ranking. The most common aspect of off-page SEO is building backlinks from reputable websites. These backlinks act as endorsements and signal to search engines that your site is trustworthy and valuable.
Other off-page strategies include social media marketing, influencer outreach, and online reputation management. These efforts help increase your website’s visibility and credibility, which can significantly impact its search engine rankings.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO emphasizes the backend elements of your website that influence its performance and accessibility for search engines. This includes enhancing site speed, ensuring mobile compatibility, resolving crawl errors, and developing an XML sitemap.
By completing technical SEO, you ensure that search engines can easily crawl and index your site, which is integral to achieving higher rankings in SERPs. Addressing technical issues helps prevent issues that might hinder your website’s ability to rank well and provide a smooth experience for users.
Pros and Cons of SEO
When considering SEO as part of your digital marketing strategy, it’s important to weigh its advantages against its drawbacks to understand if it will align with your business goals and resources.
Pros
- Cost-Effective in the Long Run: Unlike paid advertising, once your website ranks well organically, you can maintain those positions without having to manage ongoing costs per click. This makes SEO a budget-friendly option over time.
- Builds Credibility and Trust: High organic rankings often result in users perceiving your website as more trustworthy and authoritative compared to paid ads. This credibility can enhance your brand’s reputation.
- Sustainable Traffic Growth: Effective SEO strategies can lead to a steady increase in website traffic. As your content gains traction, more visitors are likely to find your site through search engines.
- Better User Experience: SEO means making your website better by improving how it looks, how fast it loads, and what information it has. This helps search engines find your site more easily and makes it more enjoyable for people who visit. A user-friendly site can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
- Higher Click-Through Rates (CTR): Organic search results generally attract a higher volume of clicks compared to paid advertisements. Users tend to trust and prefer clicking on organic listings over advertisements.
Cons
- Time-Intensive: Achieving and maintaining high search rankings requires a huge investment of time. Results from SEO efforts can take several months to become noticeable.
- Constantly Changing Algorithms: Search engines regularly update their algorithms, which can affect your rankings. Keeping abreast of these changes and adapting your strategies accordingly can be a complex task.
- Competitive Nature: In highly competitive industries, ranking on the first page of search results can be difficult. It mostly requires substantial effort and expertise to outperform competitors.
- Unpredictable Results: Unlike paid search, where you can predict outcomes based on your budget and bid strategy, SEO results can be less predictable. Factors such as algorithm updates or changes in competitor strategies can unexpectedly influence your rankings.
- Requires Ongoing Effort: SEO is an ongoing process that requires consistent effort. To sustain and enhance your search rankings, it is essential to engage in continuous optimization, regular content creation, and strategic link building.
What Is Paid Search?
Paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, involves paying for advertisements to appear on search engine results pages. Advertisers bid on relevant keywords based on their business offerings, and when users search for those terms using Google Search, their ads may appear alongside organic results. Unlike SEO, which focuses on organic traffic, paid search results provide immediate visibility and traffic by placing your ads at the top of search results.
Keyword Research
Similar to SEO, keyword research is crucial in PPC campaigns. Identifying the right keywords ensures that your ads reach the intended audience. However, in PPC, the focus is also on selecting keywords that offer a balance between search volume and cost-per-click (CPC).
By targeting keywords that are both relevant and likely to convert, you can effectively maximize your advertising spend and ensure that your budget is used the right way.
Bid Setting
Bid setting is a key component of PPC campaigns. Advertisers determine how much they are willing to pay for each click on their ads for specific keywords. The bid amount, combined with the quality score of your ad and landing page, influences the ad’s position on the SERP.
Proper bid management involves continuously adjusting bids based on performance data to optimize the return on investment and ensure that your ads, such as Google Ads, remain effective.
Ad Creation
It is necessary to create content for ads that is compelling to ensure the success of PPC campaigns. Ads should be clear, relevant, and enticing to encourage users to click. This involves crafting effective headlines, concise descriptions, and strong calls to action.
In addition to creating ads that stand out, ensuring that they align with the user’s search intent and the landing page content enhances the likelihood of conversions. A well-designed ad can significantly improve your click-through rates and overall campaign performance.
Audience Targeting
This is another key component of paid search campaigns. Audience targeting empowers advertisers to reach pre-defined segments of the marketplace. Advertisers can employ a variety of criteria in segmenting their market, from demographics like age, income, and gender to interests, location, and even the behavioral patterns of the customers they are looking to target specifically.
Audience targeting is so effective because it allows advertisers to align advertisements with the desires and expectations of the intended audience, which naturally increases the relevance of the ads and boosts conversion rates.
Advanced targeting options, such as remarketing, allow advertisers to retarget those who have interacted with their website and/or engaged with their products and services. This practice further improves the effectiveness of PPC advertising campaigns.
Pros and Cons of Paid Search
Paid Search, like any strategy, comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Evaluating these will help you decide if this strategy will be suitable for your business objectives and budget.
Pros
- Immediate Visibility and Traffic: One of the biggest benefits of PPC is the ability to gain instant exposure. As soon as your campaign goes live, your ads can appear at the top of search engine results, driving traffic to your website without the wait associated with SEO.
- Highly Targeted Advertising: PPC platforms offer advanced targeting options, allowing you to reach specific audiences based on demographics, location, interests, and even past behaviors. This precision ensures that your ads are seen by those most likely to be interested in your products or services.
- Measurable Results: With PPC, every aspect of your campaign is trackable. You can monitor metrics such as clicks, impressions, conversion rates, and return on investment in real time. This data-driven strategy empowers you to make informed decisions and enhance your campaigns for improved performance.
- Control Over Budget: PPC allows you to set daily or monthly budgets, giving you complete control over how much you spend. You can adjust your spending based on performance, ensuring that you stay within your financial limits while maximizing your ad effectiveness.
- Flexibility and Scalability: PPC campaigns can be easily adjusted to meet changing business needs. Whether you want to scale up during peak seasons or pivot your strategy based on market trends, PPC offers the flexibility to adapt quickly.
Cons
- Costly Over Time: While PPC can deliver immediate results, the costs can quickly add up, especially in highly competitive industries. Continuous investment is required to maintain your brand’s visibility, which can become expensive if not managed carefully.
- Requires Expertise: Effective PPC management demands a good understanding of keyword bidding, ad copywriting, and campaign optimization. Without the necessary expertise, it’s easy to waste your appropriated budget on ineffective ads or poorly targeted keywords.
- Temporary Results: Unlike SEO, which can provide long-lasting traffic, the benefits of PPC stop once you stop funding your campaigns. This means that ongoing investment is necessary to sustain traffic levels.
- Ad Fatigue: Over time, your target audience may become desensitized to your ads, leading to decreased engagement and click-through rates. Keeping your ad content fresh and relevant is essential to combat ad fatigue.
Click Fraud Risks: PPC campaigns are susceptible to click fraud, where competitors or malicious users repeatedly click on your ads to deplete your budget. While there are measures to detect and prevent click fraud, it remains a potential risk that can affect your campaign’s cost-effectiveness.
What Should I Invest In First: SEO or Paid Search (PPC)?
Traditionally, we at Que Commerce have professed that investing in paid search is a great way to kick start your digital marketing efforts (pending you’ve invested in the proper assets including an effective responsive website as well as a business that really does solve a problem).
Lately, we have noticed instances where going straight into search engine optimization proves a more effective strategy. As SEO companies deal with Google now fully encrypting all search keywords for organic searches, understanding when it’s best to invest in either can be ever more important than today. Here we outline reasons to invest in SEO versus Paid Search (PPC).
Reasons To Invest In SEO First
Cashflow is Not An Immediate Driver
Most small businesses have not hired a technical SEO company to serve as an extension of their marketing department. And to that extent most small businesses rely on cashflow to reinvest and grow their businesses. Given that SEO is a long-term strategy that yields ongoing and increased traffic, small businesses may not reap the ROI they are seeking in the first 2 months of launching an SEO campaign. However, SEO for the long term does produce much higher ROI impact than Paid Search.
Your Firm’s Average Customer Value Is Fairly Low
For illustration, we’ve had a number of authors who approach us requesting that we perform search engine optimization to help their books ranks higher in the search engines. These are individual brands with limited budgets, so near term sales don’t entirely drive future strategy or reinvestments. The sale of the books won’t impact the same decisions that publishing companies may have. However, due to the cost of SEO ($1,500 – $10,000’s per month), investing in SEO becomes a pricy proposition for people and companies that offer a low average customer value product or service unless:
- There is an expected repeat number of sales
- The expected referral value is high
- Digital competitive nature of the industry and keywords we’re attempting to rank for is low to medium
Keep in mind SEO has to extend beyond direct sales. It has to include branding as part of the mindset for shoppers. If your average customer value is low and you’re focused on more of a long-term strategy, SEO could be a better source of growth for you.
Branding versus direct response marketing is our goal
Companies with a branding agenda are more critical than capturing immediate sales. Take for example the new product that was just launched yesterday that had no traditional branding campaign (TV, Radio, Print) as well as no distribution partnerships. The product is only being sold online at this time. If direct response is the goal, search engine optimization will prove a disappointing strategy because getting quick sales feeds the beast much quicker. However, if these same companies place about 75 – 80% of their effort on branding through the use of SEO with the hope that 25 – 30% will translate into more sales, the business objectives will be further in line with where the product is based on brand awareness.
Reasons To Invest In Paid Search First
Immediate Sales Will Make All The Difference For Us
If you want to captures sales and attract eyeballs to your brand, focus on paid search. When you have 4 billion searches occurring online each and everyday, a large share of companies that leverage paid search (pay per click advertising) are getting a huge shot in the arm. This approach is predicated on the average customer value, cashflow implications, and the competitiveness of the industry in which you are advertising via certain keywords. All of these factors can impact the decision to leverage paid search.
You Are Testing Product/Service Offerings
This is a not a perfect system, but leveraging paid search to test out products and services can be effective to get initial data along with future protected costs to the advertiser. These tests don’t have to cost the company a lot of money and can drive sales and interested buyers to the brand. We also leverage this approach to test out a website and how certain keywords line up with the user experience and content on the website.
Reasons To Invest In Both Simultaneously
Prefer To leverage Paid Search Data To Drive SEO Strategy
With the recent “Not Provided” change within Google where close to 100% of keywords will not be shared through organic searches (many SEO’s are shocked but were expecting this), leveraging paid search will become even more important to discern bounce rates and User Experience for specific keywords. Many times, we’ll leverage paid search data to drive which keywords are producing the proper conversions for our clients. The traffic is immediate, the data is incredibly measurable, and nimble SEO teams can make ongoing enhancements to SEO campaigns through the use of paid search data.
Implementing an Integrated Digital Strategy
If you have a decent size budget in which you’re allocating to some reasonable offline marketing channels including sponsorships, events, print, and direct mail, allocating a portion of the marketing budget to both paid search and SEO can prove even more advantageous because inbound marketing typically costs less than outbound marketing channels and that marketing mix can be even more powerful if your SEO team is leveraging offline marketing into the digital realm. One tip for companies who choose this approach is to leverage recent sponsorships to attain backlinks pointing back to your website. If you are also implementing a paid search campaign from potential searchers in the market, you can even further leverage those sponsorships and further ensure they are landing on your website.
There are a hosts of reasons to leverage SEO versus PPC, but overall if you are a company looking to increase your brand awareness and direct sales, understand both sides of the ledger can be critical to the success of your online marketing efforts.