SEO vs PPC – Which one is better for your business?

Before jumping into this SEO vs PPC battle we will understand the difference between these two digital marketing strategies. 

SEO or Search engine optimization is an optimization process to affect your website or a web page visibility on the search engine’s unpaid results. 

PPC or Pay-per-click also called cost per click, CPC is a paid advertising process where you pay to get direct traffic to websites, With PPC, an advertiser pays a publisher such as a search engine such as Google, a website owner you want to advertise at or a network of websites where your ad is published on multiple websites. With PPC you pay every time your ad gets clicked.

When deciding on investing in digital marketing, most companies share the same concern; is it more profitable to invest in SEO or in PPC through Adwords?

As a matter of fact, this question has an easy answer. This is not, in any case, a roulette type of decision, where you have to choose whether to bet on red or black. Both solutions are equally interesting and complementary to each other for achieving a successful online digital marketing campaign.

The question should actually be, how much of the budget should be spent on each area?

In principle, we should keep in mind that Google Adwords offers immediate and measurable results with a clear return on investment. We position an ad prominently optimized and work to get a good performance in terms of conversion.

With a good strategy, keyword analysis, and proper adjustments over time, we end up developing great campaigns with an ever-improving conversion rate.

The ROI of SEO vs PPC (Adwords)

SEO is a medium to long term strategy, in which we have to periodically analyze and optimize keywords and content.

But then again, once we have positioned a keyword, we end up getting a steadily increasing traffic for a long period of time and, best of all, no direct-investment is needed. On the other hand, Adwords traffic will disappear once we don’t allocate a budget to the ads campaigns.

Today, we notice a clear difference between the two strategies. In fact, 25% of online clicks are achieved through Adwords ads and 75% are actually organic results. But gradually users are changing this trend in favor of the organic traffic.

Profitability: SEO or Adwords

For a good digital marketing campaign, both strategies should be applied. For an optimum level of profitability, we can create a campaign investing a defined budget on Adwords and, once our SEO strategy achieved a good organic positioning, we can reduce the investment in Adwords. But, even so, we should not stop using Adwords completely.

The ROI of Adwords is much clearer, as customers access directly the advertised product or service landing page. Through SEO, the customer access content of interest related to their online searches, though they don’t necessarily reach the page where to buy the desired product or service.

Conclusion

When it comes to the religious battle between SEO vs PPC. In summary, the key factor for successful digital marketing is for companies to wisely manage the budget they have, analyze and optimize both SEO and Adwords strategies and apply them as a function of improvement in turnover and conversion rate to continue growing their business online.