SEO or PPC: Making the Right Decision

SEO or PPC: Making the Right Decision

Everyone who runs a website knows the importance of traffic for their site performance. More traffic improves the performance of your website in search engines results. And with an increase in the quality of traffic, you have better chances of driving conversions.

So driving website traffic is a vital goal for every business and website owner. You have two options for this – pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO).

You can utilize PPC advertising programs to pay for your traffic. This enables you to display your ads in the sponsored results section of the search engine results pages. Whenever a viewer clicks on your ad to visit your landing page, you pay a certain fee. The amount depends on the competitiveness of your keyword.

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Alternately, you can also increase your website traffic more organically if you manage to get high rankings in organic search results by implementing well-planned SEO strategy. This improves your visibility and therefore, your chances of driving traffic.

In order to get your site on the first few pages of relevant search engine results, you will need to follow technical SEO best practices. This may take time, but the free, targeted website traffic will prove well worth the time and investment.

Making the Right Choice 

So, which one is better for you – SEO or PPC? This depends on several factors including your needs and budget. 

If you want to get instant results and have the budget for it, PPC would be a good option. However, if you don’t have the budget to spare and you’re not necessarily looking for quick results, SEO would be the better choice.

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Budget 

When making a choice between the two marketing strategies, you need to decide what budget your business can support. If you have no money to spare, then focus on free SEO methods. But even if you have a little capital, consider investing in PPC advertising. 

Industry CPC

After setting your overall budget, analyze how other people in the industry are paying for their ads. 

Typically, PPC platforms allow users to bid the amount they are willing to pay for a single keyword click. This fee is called “cost-per-click” (CPC). If the price for a particular keyword is too high and would be difficult to profit from, then SEO is a better choice.

SERP Competition

You will also need to determine the competitiveness of the keywords you have chosen to target. For this, you can leverage keyword discovery tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and Keywordtool.io. 

Using these tools, you just need to enter your keywords to get an idea of how much they will cost. These tools will show you calculated competition level along with the number of advertisers that are bidding on those keywords.

Source: Keyword Tool

So What’s the Right Choice?

SEO and PPC are powerful tools but you don’t have to choose just one. Instead, you can take a combined approach. 

Also Read: Must Read SEO Interview Questions & Answers

This powerful duo, when combined, can give you amazing results. Carefully execute well-targeted PPC campaigns while simultaneously ranking high in organic search results for those same keywords. This creates a sense of authority around your company.

Learn more about SEO and PPC by checking out this infographic by SpyFu.

Image courtesy: SpyFu

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