When it comes to investing in your business’ digital marketing, it is important to know where you should allocate your funds in order to achieve the best results. Having a clear understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of all avenues of digital marketing is important, to ensure that you are investing in the right channel which will generate the most return for your business. Whether you’re a start-up or an SME, there are plenty of different options to take, with two of the most common in the realm of digital marketing being SEO and PPC. Here, we’re taking a closer look at the difference between the two, to help you to determine which is better for your business.
SEO
Whether you’re looking to perform SEO in-house or you’re set to turn to an Essex SEO agency, having a clear understanding of what SEO is and what you should seek to achieve is imperative. SEO is short for search engine optimization and can be adopted by businesses in all industries. It is suggested that organic results are 8.5x more likely than PPC ads to be clicked in a search engine, suggesting that SEO has a much higher value. However, the process of obtaining organic search results can be lengthy and may even prove difficult depending on the competitiveness of your target market.
Nevertheless, the biggest weakness in SEO is the fact that algorithms tend to change on a very regular basis, meaning knowing how to stay ahead of the curve is imperative. It has been noted that businesses can drop in positions literally over-night, so it is important to understand that SEO is more about maintaining the positions as opposed to simply obtaining them.
PPC
PPC is short for pay-per-click, and is the paid search advertising option, when compared to the organic methods of SEO. Essentially, this means that you are paying a certain amount for each person who clicks on your campaign, which is dependent on the keywords you are looking to target within your ads, the quality of your ads and the competitiveness of your market. PPC offers a much higher conversion rate than traditional SEO, sitting at around 1.5x more likely to convert, but the opportunity to be seen in paid search results is far smaller. Further to this, PPC can be very expensive to maintain, so you will need to have a significant budget for this avenue.
Which Is Better?
There are three questions that you should ask yourself before determining whether SEO or PPC is better for your business. Firstly, you will need to determine how much budget you have for your digital marketing. PPC can be exceptionally expensive, particularly in the most competitive of markets, and while you are able to place small bid limits on each campaign, it isn’t always necessarily going to draw the best results if your budget is minimal and target keywords are highly competitive.
SEO, on the other hand, can be worked out on a monthly retainer, meaning you know exactly what you are getting from the money that you are putting in. However, SEO is a long-term, gradual process, and a true investment – you may not achieve results straight away, but the longer you are investing in your SEO, the better the results will be.
It is also important to determine how high the average CPC’s in your industry are, as this can help to determine whether or not PPC is a worthwhile investment. In the same breath, you should determine the competitiveness of SERPs within your niche, in order to see if strong SEO positions are a viable option on the budget that you have.
As you can see, when deciding between SEO and PPC, there are a lot of questions that you will need to ask yourself – and the biggest deciding factor will be the effectiveness of the campaign when compared to your budget.
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This content made possible by site supporter Harry Isaacs.
Photo by Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash
Article source: https://goodmenproject.com/business-ethics-2/which-is-better-for-your-business-seo-or-ppc/