Are you caught up in the never-ending fight between SEO and PPC? This isn't the first time you've felt this way. Multinational CMOs are constantly battling with how to maximise marketing ROI by achieving the best possible synergy between their SEO and PPC initiatives.
Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising are already in use at your organisation (PPC). You appreciate what SEO works for your company because it allows you to benefit from organic search at a reasonable cost. PPC, on the other hand, appeals to you because it produces results very immediately after you put your advertising.
You already know that both marketing strategies are effective. But do you know how much money each vehicle will bring in? Are you aware of how to combine them to boost your company's revenue?
Let's look at the benefits and drawbacks of organic SEO vs. PPC so you can strike the right balance for maximum digital marketing impact.
Key Points
- When weighing the advantages and disadvantages of SEO vs. PPC, bear in mind that both marketing strategies can help your business expand.
- When done effectively, SEO is extremely profitable and produces long-term, sustainable results. It's important to keep in mind, though, that results take time to materialise.
- PPC gets you results right now. PPC, on the other hand, is expensive and escalates your acquisition cost.
- Both SEO and PPC are crucial parts of your marketing mix, but they serve different purposes.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of Search Engine Optimization
SEO refers to the procedures and tactics that make your website as search engine friendly as possible. For a set of carefully selected questions, a well-executed SEO strategy can help your website rank higher in organic search results.
Google's goal is to offer the most useful, relevant, and trustworthy results when a user types a word into the search box. As an SEO strategist, it's your job to make sure your content appears in Google's top 10 results for those terms. Finally, you want your ideal customers to visit your website and exclaim, "This is exactly what I needed!"
Some instances of SEO actions are as follows:
- Keyword research
- Examine the opposition.
- In a technical sense, SEO
- Content SEO (on-page optimization) (content SEO)
- Audits of content
- the creation of content
- Off-Page SEO
When done properly, SEO allows searchers to see your brand at all stages of the customer journey. As a result, customers and businesses will see you as a trustworthy and well-known resource.
SEO Benefits
SEO is a very profitable business.
What is the difference between organic and sponsored search results? SEO is poised to become one of the most cost-effective vehicles in your marketing mix. In the long run, it is far more profitable than PPC.
According to Forrester Consulting's research, SEO improves a key business metric: customer lifetime value (CAC). Marketers and executives said that SEO traffic was more engaged and loyal to the company than visitors acquired through paid means.
SEO is highly scalable.
Whether you have a website with hundreds or thousands of pages, SEO can scale cost-effectively to produce compounded results. Appropriate URL architecture, for example, will benefit both existing and future web pages without needing additional effort.
In terms of expense, SEO is "always on."
Organic search rankings work for your organisation 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which is the most fundamental difference between SEO and PPC marketing. It is not necessary to spend money on advertising or to set up dayparting. Your organic search engine rankings will consistently promote your brand.
SEO is a long-term investment.
Your brand benefits not only now, but also in the future, when your SEO efforts result in high visibility in organic search results. Positive organic search exposure significantly increases the ROI of your SEO efforts over months and years.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is connected with positive branding.
If you dominate Google search, people will think of you as a key player in the business. In fact, from your audience's perspective, the simple presence of your listings on the first page of Google is a sign of confidence.
SEO occupies more space in the SERPs.
If your content is properly optimised, one page can potentially occupy multiple spots in the Google SERP. Your website will receive two slots if you rank for the featured snippet, for example. If you optimise for the People Also Ask area, you might be able to get a third spot on page one (PAA).
Customers can interact with you at various phases of the funnel thanks to SEO.
Do you want to make an impression on customers at the start of their journey? Then, for long-tail keywords and research-related topics, optimise. When your target audience's options are restricted, your brand will appear if you also optimise for middle-of-funnel (MoFu) terms. Finally, SEO at the bottom of the funnel gives you the opportunity to influence the buyer's ultimate decision (think ROI calculators).
Here's how you make a more effective conversion funnel.
SEO emphasises the uniqueness of your company.
With organic search results, you can genuinely tap into your team's creativity to gain an advantage over the competition. Each of the following content ideas can help you improve your brand's organic search results:
- Write long blog posts.
- It is possible to publish custom study reports.
- Design infographics
- Uploading SlideShares is a good idea.
- make a brand new video series
Furthermore, organic search results set your brand apart and emphasise its worth and personality.
Do you want to learn more about video advice? Take a look at our SEO video instruction!
The return on investment (ROI) of SEO increases over time.
Let's pretend you've got a hundred dollars. Now, every day for the next month, increase it by 20%. After five days, you only have $207. After 10 days, you only have $516. How much do you think your account will be worth at the end of the month? Surprisingly, the total would be $23,738, an increase of over 23,600%.
Similarly, SEO's return on investment (ROI) increases over time. As your credibility and authority improve, your entire body of work will benefit. As a result, your new pages, blogs, and other content will rank better with less effort.
Disadvantages of SEO
Implementing SEO strategies takes time.
There's no getting around it. SEO takes time to provide results, and it takes effort to achieve good results. The following is the crux of the SEO vs. PPC debate:
- PPC rewards are immediate, but they vanish if you don't pay the piper.
- Although SEO takes time, you will see a return on your investment long after you have made it. In fact, such results might sometimes linger for years.
What do you anticipate the turnaround time will be? This is determined by a number of factors, including the strength of your domain and the effectiveness of your SEO approach. You should, however, expect to see SEO results after at least six months.
You will, however, be able to... once you've done the steps below.
- Improve the usability of your website.
- Select the appropriate subjects and keywords to concentrate on.
- Make engaging material to share.
- With content marketing efforts, you may earn credible, relevant backlinks
...then further attempts should yield quicker results, perhaps within weeks or even days.
Google's Algorithm Changes
When the algorithm changes, you may need to adjust certain aspects of your SEO strategy. You should track performance over time and make adjustments as appropriate, rather than setting it and forgetting it.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of PPC
Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC advertising, is the practise of paying to be at the top (or bottom) of the SERPs, in the real estate reserved for ads. While SEO is the process of ranking naturally in search results, PPC advertising, or PPC advertising using Google Adwords or Bing Adverts, is the practise of paying to be at the top (or bottom) of the SERPs, in the real estate reserved for ads.
Using PPC, you may have complete control over the messaging and links displayed on the search results page. There's no guarantee when your ads will appear because paid search marketing is an auction, but you have more control over your campaign than you do with SEO.
PPC activities include keyword and issue research, as well as competitive analysis. There's also account architecture, campaign management, and bid management. Don't overlook ad wording, landing page development, testing, and other campaign elements.
Because PPC is so data-driven, it's vital for a PPC specialist to keep a close eye on outcomes, fine-tuning keyword, ad group, and messaging strategies on a regular basis to boost conversion rates and lower average cost per click (CPC).
Pay-Per-Advantages Click's
Results that are almost immediate
Conducting preliminary research and creating a new campaign or ad group takes time. When you start using PPC, however, you'll realise that the results are swift and simple to comprehend.
Regardless of how things play out in the long run, there are logical reasons to look at the short-term results of paid search vs organic. You could be advertising a new product, preparing for the holidays, or running a promotion or campaign. It's likely that you simply want to occupy more real estate in Google's search results. Perhaps you simply require rapid exposure while you wait for your long-term SEO efforts to bear fruit.
Information that is simple to comprehend
If your company is primarily data-driven, you'll be right at home with PPC. Because of the immediacy of the results and the uniqueness of the campaign you're running, you'll be able to get a clear, unambiguous picture of your PPC campaign's ROI.
PPC data is not just simpler by nature, but Google also makes PPC data more transparent than SEO data. Google is known for providing its paying customers with vital information that they may utilise to build a successful campaign.
Segmentation of the audience
Do you wish to target certain email addresses or audiences similar to your own? You might want to retarget users who conduct certain queries. Perhaps you'd like to target URLs for websites, apps, or YouTube videos that are related to the interests of your audience. You can achieve all of this if you use PPC.
If you want to run ads with targeted messaging in certain geographic areas, PPC is the way to go. You have the option of displaying specific advertisements in one location while other advertisements are displayed in another. Do you want to launch 50 different campaigns in 50 cities? With PPC, this isn't an issue.
PPC's disadvantages
There will be no outcomes if there is no money.
Because they are sponsored adverts, you may be able to pull a lever and see results, but if you stop pushing that lever, your traffic will evaporate. That implies that if you need to reduce your spending or stop paying altogether, your company will immediately suffer the consequences of losing converting traffic.
SEO, on the other hand, is more like to a massive boulder rolling down a steep incline: it takes a lot of effort to get it moving, but once it does, it keeps rolling long after you stop pushing.
It's a substantial financial investment.
PPC marketing demands a significant marketing spend. You don't have any money? There aren't any adverts, and there aren't any results. Furthermore, CPCs have been rising for years, meaning that simply generating a click (regardless of qualification or whether they ever become a lead or complete a purchase) now needs a higher investment than previously.
Furthermore, PPC is a never-ending fine-tuning process in which your experts experiment with different bids, ad wording, keywords, landing pages, and campaign parameters until they hit the sweet spot. That means you can't expect a 100 percent return on investment, and failed projects will almost surely cost you money. This is all part of the process, but it's also one of the reasons why PPC costs more than you might expect.
The cost of obtaining a new consumer has increased.
Customer acquisition campaigns based on PPC have a high cost. Many huge organisations spend six or seven figures on PPC each month, resulting in astronomically high acquisition costs.
It's impossible to avoid "banner blindness."
Banner blindness occurs when consumers fail to notice advertisements. Many internet users have gotten accustomed to seeing advertisements clog up pages with unwanted messages, and have formed the habit of quickly ignoring them in favour of the page's more valuable content.
Most users pass over the paid results at the top of the SERPs and go straight to the organic results, according to eye-tracking testing. It's aggravating to prioritise PPC in your internet marketing strategy just to find out that the majority of your target audience ignores adverts.
A SEO vs. PPC comparison
Organic vs. sponsored search statistics
Because the problem has been raging for years, there is enough of data to examine different search channels. Let's look at some SEO vs. PPC comparisons. Paid advertising has a CTR of 3.17 percent across all industries.
- According to Conductor, organic listings accounted for 64% of all SERP hits. According to the Conductor study, paid advertisements accounted for only 6% of all clicks. (The rest were either non-clicks or the searcher had moved on to an other phrase or something similar.)
- According to HubSpot, up to 80% of people ignore PPC advertisements.
- According to WordStream, the average CTR for PPC advertising across all industries is 3.17 percent.
- Advanced Web Ranking observed in April 2019 that the organic CTR on Google page one was 77.2 percent for 2,547,868 keywords across 47,781 websites. For mobile, the organic CTR was 64.97 percent.
- According to a 2018 study by Jumpshot and Moz, organic desktop listings still yield 20X more hits than PPC ads, while organic mobile listings generate 10X more clicks than PPC ads.
What inferences can we make based on this data?
SEO vs. PPC click-through rates
For starters, there is a huge difference in click-through rate between organic and paid search engine marketing. Regardless of the study described above, the period of the study, or whether the study findings were for desktop or mobile, organic search had a significantly higher CTR than paid search advertisements.
SEO appears to be the preferable strategy for increasing search traffic to your website.
SEO ROI vs. PPC ROI
We've discovered that SEO has higher click-through rates than PPC, meaning that it can drive significantly more organic traffic your way. Furthermore, when compared to PPC, SEO has a significantly cheaper cost per acquisition (CPA).
Learning how to improve SEO results will help you save money if you're currently spending six or seven figures per month on sponsored search. Consider this: if you spend a million dollars per month on sponsored search, you could certainly reduce your CPA by 60%, 70%, or even more than 80% by dominating organic search while lowering your PPC spending.
You can still plan on progressively expanding your SEO dependency if your SEO skills aren't up to standard right now. As your organic performance improves, focusing more on SEO and relying less and less on sponsored search will become more lucrative. This strategy takes time, but it's better for you than simply latching on to large paid search allocations because PPC is a known amount or "that's what you've always done."
You'll want to employ Enterprise SEO across the funnel to get the most out of your SEO efforts, from collecting those who are interested in a product or service category but are still researching it to those who are ready to buy right now.
Is SEO or PPC better for my business?
You've made it this far and are ready to find out who came out on top. For many businesses, the most common reaction is, "Why not establish an SEO and PPC synergy?"
When SEO and PPC are combined, you can take up more space on Google's SERP. PPC and SEO work together in this way to minimise competition and improve a brand's image. As a result, integrating the two strategies may help you increase your marketing ROI.
SEO is clearly the better option for long-term traffic, conversions, and ROI, and because of its compounding effect, the better you get at SEO, the more benefits you'll notice. Organic search covers web pages, blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, presentations, reports, and other forms of content marketing. Rather than relying on PPC, this allows your team to be more creative and successfully demonstrate your brand's uniqueness and personality.
That isn't to say that PPC doesn't have a role in the marketing mix. Paid search is the preferable option for a short-term promotion or if you need immediate results for a certain place, for example.
So don't feel obligated to choose between SEO and PPC. Instead, research their benefits and drawbacks and select the optimal mix for your marketing goals. If you succeed, you'll see a short-term as well as a long-term return on your investment.