Pay per Click or Search Engine Optimisation?
In our final instalment on pay per click advertising, we're going to briefly look at the main differences between PPC and SEO.
Many businesses who are starting out in online marketing understandably struggle with where to start. One of the most common dilemmas include whether to do search engine optimisation (SEO), pay per click advertising (PPC) or both, but what is the difference which should be done first?
To deal with the latter first of all, i.e. what should be done first, all depends on the objectives of your website. What’s your website about, who are you targeting, what do you want to achieve from it, how much do you have to spend are all things you need to be clear about before embarking on an online marketing campaign, and it will affect your decision as to what to begin with.
In simple terms if you’ve just launched a brand new site, want visitors to your site quickly or are looking for traffic for a promotion or special offer, then pay per click advertising is a good place to start. Brainstorm your list of keywords (unlimited), ensuring you group your keywords together. Write your ad text (test several variations), set your budget and off you go!
PPC Summary
- Instant traffic to your website
- Campaigns can be stopped / started at any time
- Budgets easy to control
- Expensive if marketplace competitive
SEO is a much lengthier process and any results from it can be long awaited. However, the sooner you start optimising your site, the sooner your site will start to appear in the natural results. You need to be as proactive as possible in promoting your website and the more competitive your industry sector, the more proactive you need to be. Don’t just focus on how your web pages rank but on overall conversions through your site (how many sales or enquiries are you getting), and use diverse content that is now being heavily indexed by the search engines – e.g blogs, video & social bookmarking.
SEO Summary
- A long term strategy
- Website traffic / leads are free
- Need to be proactive in website promotion
- High rankings raise business profile
PPC –vs- SEO
Checklist
| |
SEO |
PPC |
Comments |
|
Set up |
Several days or weeks |
Within
a few hours or days |
PPC can be set up very quickly, SEO takes time to set up and
see results |
|
Keywords |
Limited |
Unlimited |
You can sponsor as many keywords as you want to with PPC – SEO is
only effective for a limited number of keywords |
|
Cost |
Initial set up costs, organic rankings free |
Depends on competitiveness of keywords – can be high |
Once the website ranks well, leads from natural search
results are free |
|
Return on Investment(ROI) |
Higher
over longer timescale |
Lower
due to cost of every visit (or click) to the site |
ROI higher with SEO as clicks are free from the natural
search results |
|
Results |
Slow |
Fast |
SEO can take many months before results are seen
whereas PPC is more or less instant |
|
