SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) have the same goal, which is boosting the online audience for a website and drive that online traffic in your benefit. Despite this, they’re both quite different in their ways.
In Layman’s terms, SEO can be labelled as marketing and PPC as advertising. The traffic derived from SEO practices is organic which means that it is free of charge to the website owner, of course, this is a scenario where the SEO is conducted by the company itself.
PPC, is paid and therefore the search results aren’t organic. PPC represents the paid ads. Both SEO and PPC come from SEM (Search Engine Marketing).
When you google something you usually see the paid ads first and then the organic ones. Sometimes the paid ads can also be seen at the bottom of the search result page. This means that the company has paid Google so the company’s website is shown first.
Any other web search results you get will be the organic ones. They’re called organic because the results are ordered naturally. Now, there’s a reason why companies rely on paid ads and it’s because doing SEO requires a lot of effort and super hard craft.
One of the main struggles when dealing with online positioning tactics is “keywords”. The way it works with PPC depends on many factors. For instance, Google Adwords sets the price tag based on the popularity of relevant keywords and how many advertisers are interested in that particular keyword.
Companies will only pay for the clicks their ad receives which means that other factors like targeted keywords and how many times the keywords appear on the landing page.
Now, SEO, on the other hand, does have a few drawbacks. The main one is that SEO requires consistent, long-term effort. Of course, it’s possible to get a good online positioning with constant effort that keeps optimising the website. However, many companies opt for PPC because it’s easier, they just need to pay more.
The internet offers many blogs and tutorials that claim that doing SEO without enough knowledge of the way search engine work can be profitable but that’s not always the case. If an organisation doesn’t have a clear understanding on how to organically rank first in web search results, it’s best that they try paying a web search engine for the clicks.
Since that option can be expensive for some companies, we recommend them to seek the right team of experts who can guide them to achieve the perfect SEO strategy that best works for them. Click here to discover all the benefits SEO has without ruining your marketing budget.