SEO or PPC – What’s right for my business?

It’s important for any company to change their marketing strategies over time to conform to the newest lead generating technique and keep up with competitors. There’s no surprise in this digital age that all companies big and small are now trying to get online, creating websites for their business and using various digital techniques to try and pull in extra enquiries.  However, with little or no knowledge companies are making big mistakes in regards to choosing techniques that aren’t giving them the wins they’re hoping for. Today I’m going to answer the age-old question, SEO vs PPC – What’s right for my business?

SEO Benefits

SEO is a huge part of digital marketing as a whole. SEO includes all the edits you make to the company website itself to help your site appear higher in search engine ranking results. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a long process, and we don’t expect to see results until 6 – 8 weeks after implementing an SEO technique. In the long run, ongoing SEO can only ever be a positive for your business, improving the quality and visibility of your website and hitting a wide range of customers. Building traffic by achieving high rankings in organic search results is completely free if you’ve got someone in-house with a strong digital marketing knowledge, and has a long-term effect on your website traffic. By sticking to Google guidelines and following best practice SEO techniques your site will become more visible for a wider variety of search results, meaning more high-quality traffic coming to your website. Depending on how competitive the keywords you’re targeting are, it could take you a matter of weeks to start ranking in the SERPs, or a couple of years. There are lots of elements that affect your SEO ranking score, including volume of traffic, time on site, bounce rate, on-page structure, domain authority, page speed, age of domain and many more ranking factors. Therefore, you could be doing everything right, have a perfect website with a great page load time and good overall statistics, but if a competitor has all that and their domain is significantly older than yours, chances are they will rank before you for the terms you’re targeting. That’s why it’s important to keep doing SEO as an on-going practice, to optimise on all the work you’ve already done and to keep climbing until you’re at the top of the search engine results.

PPC Benefits

When it comes to the battle of SEO vs PPC, one of the biggest deciders is often budget. If you have little or no marketing budget, you’re not going to be able to partake in PPC activities. To see results from a PPC campaign, it’s best to put a decent amount of budget behind it to secure the best results from the campaign. We often see companies who have £100 a month budget and want us to work wonders with PPC, and whilst we always deliver, it’s frustrating to know if they double the budget they’d more than double the results. Especially for e-commerce sites with a large product range, it’s important to put a large portion of your budget behind a PPC campaign, as we can make the adverts so much more targeted and monitor the results down to the last click. Another positive of a PPC campaign is that they’re not affected by search engine algorithm updates. We’ve all heard the horror stories – A website has been plain sailing at the top of the search results for a number of years, all of a sudden Google brings in a new update, their search visibility crashes and overnight their website is getting next to no traffic. PPC makes you immune from this, as your adverts will still be running just the same, getting just as much visibility as they were before the update. This means you will still be getting a constant flow of traffic through your website, and hopefully generating leads and sales from it.

SEO vs PPC – Overview

Digital marketing is changing in a big way, and all marketing techniques are starting to need to merge together in order to form a successful marketing strategy.  As I mentioned earlier, one of the largest SEO ranking factors is the volume of traffic to your website – regardless of where it’s come from. This is why email marketing, social media marketing and PPC are so important as a part of your overall strategy. If you can bring traffic to your website using these elements, it will help to boost your SEO and organic search rankings. Don’t get me wrong, having a good volume of traffic to your website isn’t enough alone to get you ranking, but that’s why on-page SEO is still a huge part of the overall strategy. With this shift in strategy, we’re often now trying to offer customers a wider marketing strategy that offers them all the above practises to boost their online presence as a whole, rather than trying to optimise using only one.  PPC is great for quick wins, new start-ups with plenty of budget just trying to get their name out there and boost brand exposure. SEO is an essential for any business, it’s a long-term investment but it’s critical for successfully running any website, especially an online store. But, take my advice: speak to Fifteen and let us plan you a fool-proof digital marketing strategy, complete with the latest techniques to help get your website ranking. Use digital marketing elements in tandem with one another, and reap the rewards from it later on. In conclusion on the battle of SEO vs PPC – It’s most definitely a tie.