Should I allocate my marketing budget towards SEO Services or PPC Advertising?
A question frequently posed to us by new clients, so we decided to write a brief article on the topic.
Both Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) come under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Both techniques revolve primarily around increasing your websites visibility on search engine result pages and driving traffic through to your landing pages. But let’s review some differences.
Let’s start with PPC.
PPC Advertising places ads on search engine result pages or displays them on a network of sites that has opted in. The advertiser often determines when and where the ad displays by using scheduling and keyword seleciton tools. One of the key attractions of this model is the advertiser only pays when a browser clicks on their ad and proceeds through to their website. There are options to pay for impressions instead, but for the purposes of this article, we will refer to the basic model of PPC Advertising.
PPC Benefits:
- Fast implementation (ads running within a few hours)
- Fast results (often generating positive ROI in under a week)
- Usually cheaper up front
PPC Downsides:
- Paying for each click.
- Potential for wasted clicks and unqualified visitors.
- Traffic is capped by budget.
Now for SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process whereby your website is optimized so that it appears higher in Google’s organic search results (the normal search results.) SEO traditionally includes both on-site optimisation, which means arranging the content of the website in a way that is considered to be friendly to search engines, and off-site optimisation, usually the practice of building and improving the backlinks which point towards your website.
SEO Benefits:
- Can be used to generate much higher levels of traffic
- Usually presents a higher ROI in the long-term
- Organic results tend to be trusted more by users
SEO Downsides:
- Usually more expensive initially
- Can take months of investment before seeing any result.
Alright. But which should I do?
That really depends on a few important questions:
- When do you want results? Are you willing to wait for a bigger pay-off?
- What is your budget at this point? Do you need to see some quick returns before you invest larger amounts?
- How much traffic do you need from the web to grow your business? Do you have a high or low-margin product/service?
SEO and PPC work fantastic as a combination strategy. With PPC bringing you the quick results and the research into most valuable keywords, SEO providing long-term rankings on those conversion-friendly keywords. Then PPC can be switched over to plugging the gaps that you’re not ranking for with SEO, or even doubling up to further increase your traffic of the return on investment is viable.
The real answer is: it depends! It depends on your product or service and your advertising goals. Talk to one of our campaign managers today to discuss your requirements and obtain a tailored solution.