PPC vs. SEO Explored

No matter if you’re an E-Commerce business, an affiliate publisher, or just a nonprofit blogger; success on the internet comes down to one thing: traffic. As a website manager it’s essential to consistently be driving traffic – new and unique traffic – to your site every day. There are many ways this can happen outside the web, like word of mouth, print advertising, billboards, etc. However, growing traffic online most often involves two basic and very different strategies. These two strategies, which we’ll explore and compare today, are PPC and SEO.

PPC

PPC stands for “Pay Per Click” – a traffic strategy where advertisements, in the form of links, are placed across the internet by websites, or “publishers.” These advertisement links can take the form of text, images, videos or any other linkable form available. These links are tracked using a variety of platforms, and clicks through the links to the targeted websites are recorded. Usually based on a predetermined price, the purchaser of the link advertisement, or “Advertiser” is then charged a per click fee for the amount of traffic the publisher’s ad drove to their website. Hence the term “Pay Per Click.” “Google AdWords” is one of the most common, and successful advertising platforms for text based PPC ads – these are the search results you see in the beige colored box at the very top of your screen when you perform a search in google. Some main characteristics and benefits of PPC are:

• You can get results quickly, as a PPC campaign is quick to launch if you’re willing to pay right away

• Prices and budgets are within the realm of your control – you can even create a spending cap on a per day, or per week basis

• If you want to make sure your advertising investment has the best success, you can employ a PPC Agency to manage your PPC efforts for you

• A/B tests of different ads are quick to show results, as all trackable traffic elements are within your control

SEO

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” – a traffic strategy where a website owner or webmaster tweaks and “optimizes” their own onsite web content, as well as attempts to influence the web content of other sites, in order to appear more frequently, and visibly in higher ranking positions within internet search engine results. Because search engine results are powered by the “keywords” that searchers type into the search bar, certain keywords are targeted by SEO strategists as goals – with the ultimate objective as their website returning in the search engines as the number one or “top” search result for that given keyword query. SEO only applies to the “natural” search results, or the search results under the beige advertisement box at the top of the search results screen. SEO can take the shape of many different smaller strategies such as, link building, onsite content creation, offsite content creation, HTML optimization, etc. Some main characteristics and benefits of SEO are:

• If done personally, SEO is “free” to implement (only the time it takes you)

• Niches of less competitive keywords can return top results for your website with less competition than Google PPC can for example

• Usually does take some “ramp up” time for efforts to get noticed by search engines

• Testing and value attribution can be challenging, with several different efforts contributing to traffic success

• If expert advice or employed services are desired, once can pay an SEO Agency to work on SEO for their website

Main Differences 

While both PPC and SEO can drive traffic to your site when done successfully, and can even be run at the same time – they have some key differences that will affect their success depending on your unique situation:

• SEO it ideal for someone low on capital and high on time. If you are sitting in your mother’s basement looking to launch a website with no money – SEO is going to be your number one strategy to get traffic. With PPC, there’s simply no way to avoid spending money to get results.

• PPC can generate results quickly. If you setup a website in one day, you could launch a PPC campaign and have traffic that same evening. You’re never going to get this kind of speed with SEO – it simply takes weeks or months for the changes that happen both on your site, as well as other’s sites to be seen by the search engines; and then get you natural search traffic.

• Uniquely targeted website pages that are geared toward their sources are known as “Landing Pages.” These pages will differ greatly between PPC and SEO. While it’s completely appropriate for a PPC landing page to appear as an ad with a sales based message – the same landing page isn’t likely to rank well for SEO (unless the search keywords were something like “shopping coupons and offers”.)

When executed properly, both of these strategies can send you excellent amounts of traffic. Optimized even more, they can send you the best traffic that’s most likely to take the actions you want them to most once they get to your site. On the other hand, if executed poorly – SEO can be a huge waste of your time, and PPC can be a huge waste of money AND time… The important thing is to do some more research of the detailed methods that will help ensure your success once you launch into one of these strategies. Beyond that, you’ll see that both PPC and SEO can be essential to your internet success!

Author: Tyler Watkins is a Marketing Manager at Printing for Less, America’s leader in Postcard Printing.