Mutual Influence of SEO And PPC

 

Are you trying to choose if you should invest in SEO or PPC? It is one of the crucial topics whether budgets should be distributed toward SEO or PPC or divided between both.

It depends on a whole lot of various factors. To choose which strategy to use, you need to know the pros and cons of SEO and PPC and how they can work jointly to boost your business growth. In this guide, we'll dive deep into each of these tactics and help you to decide which channel is right for you.

 

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a consistent long-term effort to create and promote your content to rank on search engines. With SEO marketing, websites get excellent results in highly targeted traffic, qualified leads, and sales. Once you start ranking on Google, Bing, or Yahoo, brand visibility stays 24/7 for several months or years.

 

The reason for throat cut competition among the website owners for SEO is obvious. SEO is the only marketing channel where you don't need to pay for any lead generation, clicks, or even sales. Rest all the channels such as SMM, PPC, email marketing, banner ads, and sponsored ads need huge and consistent investment.

 

What is PPC?

On the other hand, PPC stands for pay per click. As the name suggests, you need to pay for every click. But still, PPC is very popular and one of the top choices for marketers.

 

Why?

 

Developing excellent organic visibility and ranking on SERPs through SEO takes a lot of time. If your competition is high, then it may take years to overrank your competitor. And there is no guarantee that you will overrank even after spending huge money, resources, and time.

 

Here, the role of PPC becomes super important. You can create PPC in a day and can see the results immediately.

Pros and cons of SEO

Pros:

  • Organic growth is a testimonial of your victory over your competitors with the holistic marketing approach. As a website owner, you feel proud when your webpages start ranking on SERPs. Because ranking through SEO is possible when Google loves and rewards you, the audience trusts your content.

  • More than 52% of the total searches come from SEO only. So, the ecosystem of SEO is always robust and relevant to any other marketing channel.

  • Traffic and leads generated through organic search are more targeted and qualified.

  • One of the best things about SEO is the number of clicks is entirely free. You need not pay any single penny. If you do SEO in the right direction by using appropriate SEO tools and start ranking, the SERPs' visibility will be 24/7. The results are sustainable for several months and years. But in PPC ads, once your budget is gone, you will lose visibility on search engines.

  • In SEO, no one can snatch your ranking on search engines by paying money. But in PPC ads, ranking fluctuates as per the bidding of your competitors.

  • You always get a higher volume of traffic in SEO (almost ten times) and 15 times more clicks than PPC without spending heavily on ads.

  • Last but not least, users always trust more on organic results than paid ads.

 

Cons:

  • SEO is not an overnight task. It is one of the toughest nuts of marketing, which is not easy to crack. Depending on your niche and competition, it can take several months or a year to generate significant SEO revenue.

  • Google and other search engines make hundreds of changes regularly that are an overburden to the website owners. It needs a great team of SEO experts, professionals, content creators, designers, developers, inbound marketing, and the best man on the link building job. Therefore, SEO's biggest myth is that people think it is free, easy, and a sprint race. The reality is, SEO is a marathon that needs a considerable amount of investment, long-term consistency, approach, in-house highly qualified team, and more.

  • Keyword research, content creation, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO, international SEO are some of the pillars of SEO where you need to work hard.


 

Pros and cons of PPC

Pros:

  • Unlike SEO, any Google updates can not affect your website. The moment you decide to rank on a search engine, you can rank, no matter your domain's age, content length, backlinks, social media traction, or even authority of your website. The results will reflect immediately based on your PPC campaign. Instantly. You can drive traffic, leads, and then sales, whereas SEO can take months or even years.

  • You have tight control over your budget, geography, demographic factors with a highly targeted audience approach. This way, you can target the commercial keywords and bring them directly to the landing pages to increase your conversion rate.

  • PPC Ads are an effective short term strategic approach. Suppose you have an eCommerce website, and during the festive season, you want to maximize your sales so PPC can give you an incredible amount of return. Similarly, if you are an ed-tech company and want to generate a deal from day one, PPC can be the best option.

  • For every $1.60 invested in Google Ads, you can get $3. These statistics sound quite reasonable for the marketers; almost 40% of brands are planning to increase their marketing budget in PPC only. It increases brand awareness by up to 80%.

  • Another beauty of PPC ads is its visibility on SERPs. The results are displayed at the most prominent position above the organic search results on the mobile, desktop, and tablet devices as the studies show that 50% of the search traffic clicks on the top 3 sponsored links.

  • Unlike SEO, PPC does not require a large in-house team and consistent long term efforts. You only need a PPC ad specialist who has good hands-on, creating great ad banners/copies and landing pages. It saves a lot of time, cost, and resources if we compare PPC with SEO.

  • Be it B2B, B2C, or B2G; data is the backbone of any business. With PPC ads, you can own a highly qualified database.

  • Unlike SEO, in PPC, you can quickly run A/B testing with Google Ads and identify which is working better for you.

Cons:

  • As the name suggests, PPC is not free at all, unlike SEO. You will have to spend a huge marketing budget and pay for every single click that visitors will make to your site from an ad. Only some of the industries get the benefit of low click costs. Industries like insurance, marketing, advertising pay more than $10 for every click.

  • Unlike SEO, you can not set and forget PPC ads. You have to optimize your campaigns regularly and do A/B testing to improve the results.

  • As I told you earlier, for most industries, PPC ads are extremely expensive. If you do not have expertise in running PPC ads, it can eat your marketing budget. So, be aware. Otherwise, your experience can be horrible.

  • Since you are paying a reasonable amount for getting every click; hence, in PPC ads, your conversion rate becomes a super important success metric. The more you invest, the better results you will get. But if the visitors are not converting again, it is a massive loss for your business.

  • You can not start PPC ads, unlike SEO. You need a massive initial budget to run ads and bring money. As you know, your website will rank until you run PPC ads. Once you turn ads off, your website will not be visible, and traffic stops. Then you can not generate leads.

Growth strategy of SEO

  • Keyword Research

  • Content

  • On-Page SEO

  • Off-Page SEO

  • Technical SEO

  • Local SEO/Global SEO

 

Growth strategy of PPC

The growth hacks of PPC to skyrocket your business sales and revenue can be achieved through 5 major paid ad types:

 

  • Search Ads in the form of text that usually on Google and Bing

  • Shopping Ads

  • Display Ads

  • Gmail Ads

  • YouTube Ads

Conclusion

Finally, with my experience, research, and overall analysis, I would like to say, as a website owner, you should always run behind the SEO as it is a long term consistent approach. But when it comes to increasing sales volume, multiplying revenue on some festive occasions, increasing brand visibility, overrank or overrule your competitors with accelerated growth and holistic marketing approach, keep investing in PPC.If you have a project or need expertise, call on our social media experts from the digital marketing agency in Lahore. They provide niche-specific services.