Pay-per-click PPC is a short-term digital marketing strategy that requires advertisers to pay a certain fee every time online users click on one of their ads. These ads drive paid online traffic to your website with relevant keywords. A specific PPC campaign requires detailed research on keywords that your target audience is searching for related to your industry. However, you need to create a compelling landing page to convert your leads into customers.
Search Engine Optimization SEO is a long-term digital marketing strategy that helps you build free traffic to your website by increasing your visibility on search engines. What SEO does to your website is make it appear valuable to popular search engines. However, it is a long-term process and requires a lot of patience to achieve useful results. Although SEO won’t allow you to rank your website overnight, it is cost-effective and very beneficial in the long run.
The key difference between these two strategies is that the online traffic you generate through PPC costs you money, hence the name “pay-per-click,” while the online traffic you get through SEO costs you money organically and is free. For these two digital advertising plans, you may often come across the terms “paid search engine listings” or “paid advertising and organic search engine listings.” Each of these terms basically means the same thing.
Here we will discuss some key differences between long term and short term in terms of the following parameters:
Position of search results
The position of your PPC ads in search engine results depends on several crucial factors:
- Targeted keywords
- Keywords present in your ad copy
- Keywords present on your landing page
However, one thing remains the same: your PPC ad will always appear either at the top or bottom of organic search results.
With PPC, you can get your ad to the first page of search results by paying a higher cost per click (CPC).
Organic results from SEO efforts only appear in the middle of the search results page. The level of optimization of your website in terms of on-site and off-site SEO determines whether or not your listings can appear in the top positions or on the first page of search results.
For SEO, you can achieve first page rankings in search results if you have effectively optimized your website.
Total cost
PPC campaigns require some direct investment to get online traffic from search engines. If you use Google Adwords, the total cost of using the service depends on factors that determine the success of an individual advertising effort, including:
- Keyword popularity
- Number of advertisers using a specific keyword
- Number of respective websites with ad positions for a specific keyword
With PPC, you only pay the fee for the clicks you get from your ads and not for the ad views. You can also set your daily PPC advertising campaign budget in advance by calculating an estimate of the average cost per click (CPC) for your targeted keywords. The Google Keyword Tool, part of Google Adwords, gives you an estimate for each keyword’s CPC.
With PPC, you only pay the fee when online users click on your ad, and you can use the Google Keyword Tool to calculate your paying potential.
Although SEO does not require direct investment, it takes a lot of effort and hard work to attract free online traffic from search engines. Generally, there is increased competition for every top-ranking keyword, for which you need a good SEO plan and a fully optimized website to achieve one of the top search engine positions. If you have no idea about SEO, you need to hire an SEO expert to drive search engine traffic to your website.
There are no direct costs. You cannot pay a fixed fee to get to the first page of search engines. However, you may need to pay for professional SEO services if you cannot do it yourself.
Traffic potential
Which of these two digital marketing strategies can help drive more online traffic to your website? You can get more clicks with PPC ads. However, this also means that you pay more for your advertising efforts. On the other hand, organic traffic from SEO is a continuous process as long as you stay at the top of search engine results for your targeted keywords.
Conversions
Driving online traffic to your website is not enough. You still need to convert your online visitors into customers. With PPC, when you use highly optimized and targeted advertising campaigns, your visitors are more likely to convert than those who come from organic searches. However, PPC ads are also more expensive than SEO efforts.
When you use SEO, your web pages can rank for different keywords, so online users may not be searching for the exact product or service mentioned on a particular landing page. In general, organic traffic is better than other types of traffic, including social media; However, SEO traffic is not as good as PPC traffic when it comes to conversions.
Reach First is a specialized customer-focused digital marketing service provider based in Edmonton, Alberta. Visit our website to learn more about our high-quality services or contact us for personalized assistance.