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Published September 27th, 2016 by

SEO and Pay Per Click: The Advantages of Online Advertising

SEO and PPC: The Advantages of Online AdvertisingBasically, any online marketer or advertiser will have to choose between doing search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. These two are distinct approaches but utilize a common fundamental aspect in the form of keywords. Both are effective in certain situations and will yield the best results if done in combination.

The Importance of Online Visibility

A typical online marketer’s aim is to achieve online visibility. This is important for businesses nowadays since many consumers are now heavy internet users. In order to maximize the potential in advertising and sales through the use of the internet, businesses are setting up their own websites, which not only provide information to users but also help customers engage in purchase related actions. The internet platform is also capable of handling a complete customer experience through pull marketing – it attracts customers, let them digest information, process their queries or sales, and even let businesses deliver their products using the same platform. This kind of convenience of e-commerce is what draws customers in utilizing the internet. A sensible business should grab the opportunities that the internet has, through online visibility.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization is a method used by businesses in order to be effective in building up their web presence by encouraging traffic to their websites. A typical goal is to end up in the higher page rankings in SERP, or search engine results pages. This is done by optimizing your website according to the best practices advocated by search engines that involve relevant content, optimized web structure, multimedia elements, and a host of other factors.

Search engine optimization is not a guaranteed method to attain the highest results right away, but building up your website this way can help it endure the subsequent changes that might come alongside the changes in the way search engine works. The other side of doing SEO is actually establishing a foundational structure of your business in the web, which focuses on content and its relevance to the needs of your target audience. Its mantra is to supply as many useful and relevant information that can eventually attract “clickers” and more traffic.

Search engine optimization is also called an organic or natural way of building up your business’ ranking in the SERP. Search engines doesn’t profit from any of your listing or from the clicks and views that you get.

What Is PPC?

On the other hand, PPC involves paying search engines in order to be visible in their sponsored listing, which is normally found on the top and sides of every SERP. This listing doesn’t mingle with organic search results and has its own algorithm to function in.

Basically, a business who wants to avail PPC will have to transact with search engines and use PPC marketing tools or get the service of a PPC management firm. This will help them use the best practices in PPC in order to guarantee the highest spot in the rankings. Although, as with SEO, this is not guaranteed, all the time, but traffic and ROI is generally faster to achieve when using PPC marketing campaigns than when using SEO alone.

Bidding is done over keywords that a business wanted their websites to be associated with and, in turn, pays this bid cost for every click that your listing was able to gather. Generally, PPC is expensive since bids can go practically higher as your choice of keywords become more popular. But since each click can be regarded as interested parties rather than random clickers, conversions out of the traffic it generates may be more valuable.

Like with SEO, PPC marketing services also follows ranking standards and regulations. Some factors that it considers are keyword usage, listing a message (should be optimized too), and relevance.

Pay Per Click is specifically effective with certain case scenarios that needs a faster realization of traffic or one that informs an expiring message within a specific period. Just like with any of these following situations:

  1. Flash Sales
  2. Product Launch
  3. Website Launch
  4. Wanted to Boost Sales Fast
  5. Localized Web Listing

Overall, PPC marketing is another discipline to utilize on the web that is equally effective and reliable way for your business to maximize the benefits of going online. One of its strongest benefits is that it is easier to implement, and the results are faster to realize.

SEO or PPC?

Both SEO and PPC are essential methods to gain online visibility through traffic. PPC involves high upfront cost while SEO needs longer time to build. While it is difficult to quantify each advantages it brings to businesses, both are viable to use with what your business needs at the moment, or in the long term.

But which method to use? Basically, it boils down to your business’ specific needs and your budget. It is best to take your time contemplating over each method’s strengths and weaknesses and measure it against your specific needs. Regard your online marketing methodology as your investment because even utilizing free-to-use SEO also entails some fee as well (when wanting to use professional website developers). According to the website entrepreneur.com, here are the questions to answer in order to know which method is best to consider for your business:

How Big Is Your Online Marketing Budget?

This is one of the upfront decisions that a business should do. If a business doesn’t have any budget at all, it can maximize the use of SEO. On the other hand, even a small budget can let a business explore using PPC. One can actually set a daily limit for its implementation (since you are dealing with clicks and only pay for what you get). Pay per click marketing campaigns actually boots many benefits like the following:

  1. It Can Be Tested. PPC advertisements can be continuously improved and optimized since traffic is faster to generate. Its user can closely monitor its performance regularly and tweak it according to what needs to be done. A business can also experiment with keywords to use to find the best one according to specific and prevailing market behavior.
  2. Pay Per Click is protected from SEO algorithms. This is one of the challenges that SEO face with search engines since these algorithms are changing from time to time. The thing here is when the algorithm changes, a business might lose all the rankings that it achieved and is back to square one again. In PPC though, one should still use the best practices and optimize both your PPC advertisement and your landing page in order to get maximized results. It is best to incorporate your PPC campaign to an analytics tool like Google Analytics and regularly monitors its performance and assess if your campaign is effective or not.

How High Is the Bid for Your Keyword?

Fortunately, there are tools like Traffic Estimator that can help you find greater insight on what is the average bid for the keyword you intend to use for PPC. In cases that you need to deal with high-profiled, popular keywords and you don’t have enough budget to sustain it in a considerable amount of time before reaching its ROI, using SEO might be the best choice.

How Competitive Is the SERP in Your Industry?

It is always best to assess the surrounding elements and factors that may influence your online marketing performance. Some industries can be more competitive than the others, especially in the organic search. It is noticeable that authority websites are dominating the SERP, and in these cases, a business might consider getting PPC services once in a while to experience substantial boost.

All About SEO and PPC Partnership

It is not always necessary to choose between SEO and PPC. In most cases, PPC and SEO can make a powerful combination for an online marketing strategy, and the features and weaknesses of one actually complement the other.

The website optimizesmart.com mentioned that SEO efforts will not achieve 100% effectiveness without leveraging paid search, or pay per click.

Since SEO and PPC are founded over the effective use of keywords, it is quite logical that its partnership is possible and will render more valuable conversions compared with using one without the other.

The ROI in SEO can be quite challenging to measure, unlike with PPC. In this sense, a business can actually use PPC to test the water first to test a series of keywords and choose the most effective to use. It is best to run this test for several weeks in order to have a more accurate assessment.

Using the incorporated analytics tool with PPC campaigns, one can actually ditch the guesswork over the performance of keywords since traffic is faster to realize in PPC. With the results you get, you can now use this for the benefit of your SEO implementation on your website, which is also the hub of your landing pages for your PPC marketing campaign. Going through this cycle can help you gain complete benefits out of PPC and SEO altogether.

As search engine algorithms continue to advance, we see a strong possible merging of PPC and SEO as  two of the most prevailing and powerful online marketing tools that businesses use in order to sustain its visibility online. No wonder that businesses are exploring all possible facets to maximize their investments in online marketing wherein they are not only aiming web traffic but revenues and high value conversions as well.

Pay Per Click and SEO can be time consuming work for some businesses that they opt to get the services from the best PPC management firms. In getting this kind of third party services, make sure that you get to evaluate their performance and credentials in order to see if they match with your business’ specific needs.

To get in touch with the different PPC management agencies and view client feedbacks and ratings, see this list from CrowdReviews.com’s reviews of PPC management firms.

Keith Moore

Keith Moore has worked with several leading Android development agencies to build customized mobile apps enabling businesses to extend the use of their services to smart phones and mobile devices.

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