When looking to grow your online presence you’ll often hear these buzzwords thrown around. PPC and SEO. So, what are they and which one is right for your business? As with online growth the goal is to generate traffic to your website. The more eyes that see you, the more of a chance one of them converts to a customer.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a group of techniques essentially used to rank your website and catapult it to the top of the page on major search engines. The traffic generated from these are organic. Studies show that 80% of a website’s traffic is a direct result of where it shows up on these search engines. The most popular being Google which receives over 3.5 billion searches every day. Google’s algorithm uses around 200 different ranking factors when determining site rankings.
One of the main advantages of organic searches (SEO) is that it doesn’t cost anything per individual click. SEO takes time to rank and once ranked it will bring in consistent traffic that grows exponentially. When you run a PPC Campaign each additional click comes at a cost, the only way to increase your clicks is to increase your ad spend. SEO is a longer-term sustainable way of increasing traffic to your site, one that keeps bringing in results even after the campaign is turned off. Think of a website as virtual real estate. In order to increase its value, it needs to have certain attributes. Among them are amount of traffic generated, consistency of traffic generated, page rank, search engine rankings over a period of time, link popularity, and the like. All of these fall in the realm of SEO
PPC or Pay Per Click Advertising is when you run google ads which allows you to “buy” clicks. It’s called PPC because you basically have to Pay Per Click. This can be very effective if you want to drive traffic immediately attract a highly targeted user to your website. You can target users based on demographic data such as age range, gender, income bracket, education level, and even marital status. PPC can be scaled and optimized right away based on your budget and criteria. Unlike SEO, you don’t have to worry about the search engine’s algorithm ranking you atop of the page because you are bidding on the top spots on the search result. You can also target non-conventional traffic sources via Google’s partner websites such as its maps and YouTube. When your budget runs out for the day or month your ads are stopped and traffic ceases. Treat it as a faucet; when is on traffic comes pouring in and when its off nothing happens.
So, What Works for Me?
It really depends on what your goal, industry and budget may be. The best method for short- and long-term results is a well-structured combination of both SEO and PPC as you get the advantages of both. This will allow you to quickly start generating traffic whilst slowly ranking on google. If your business needs immediate results PPC may be the better option and if you want slow compounding growth SEO is the right choice. In our experience, the best results stem from when we work together with our clients and create a yearly plan that focuses on both SEO and PPC.
At ML360 we’re here to assist in taking your business online and/or strengthen your current online presence. Your Success is our Success! Contact Us in the form below and we’re here for you each step of the way forward.
