Which is better: Search engine optimization or Pay per click?

Calgary search engine optimization - Professional SEO

Which is better: SEO or PPC?

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When it comes to ecommerce marketing, there are two giants you must have heard of, SEO and PPC. For some businesses, SEO is the key to generate higher sales, while for others, PPC is a highly effective solution to increase your potential customers. Before we move on to the comparison, you must know what SEO and PPC actually are.
What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about driving organic traffic to your website. Most of the high-end ecommerce businesses spend thousands of dollars on SEO each month to improve the rank. SEO delivers great results, and once you have reached high rank, you tend to stay as long as a competitor starts investing a lot in SEO and caters SEO requirements.
What is PPC?

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a marketing technique used by ecommerce websites to draw a lot of traffic their way. The ads display at the top on various social media sites as well as on high ranked pages of Google. When an internet surfer clicks the ad, he is lead to your website. And so, you have a new visitor.
SEO vs. PPC

Marketing strategies and business goals vary from company to company. Accordingly, people choose to go for SEO or PPC for their business. Having known what SEO and PPC are, you need to decide on your own, which is better for you. Following are the factors that put forward key differences between SEO and PPC:

Website traffic

When it comes to website traffic, SEO drives organic traffic to your website depending on how well you adhere to SEO requirements and follow SEO trends such as fast loading speed, inserting keywords and LSI keywords in your content, adding internal and external links, etc. This way, SEO drives quality visitors who have more chances to convert into customers.

On the other hand, PPC drives quick traffic to your website by displaying your ad almost everywhere. It might bring a lot of visitors to your website, but only a few of them become customers.

Cost-effectiveness

The visitor that comes to your website through SEO is free of cost; however, you need to pay for each visitor that lands on your website by clicking on an ad with a PPC campaign. The cost-per-click (CPC) varies from one business to another and depends on what you want out of your PPC campaign.

If you are targeting a local audience, then PPC costs are lower, but when you need to promote your brand across the world, PPC costs spiral up. These can be as low as $1 per each click and as high as $70 per each click.

As far as cost-effectiveness is concerned, SEO is the winner as it brings long term visitors at a cheaper cost.

Targeting the audience

If your business is newer and you need to target audience to increase your brand visibility, a PPC campaign would immediately do so. It displays the business ad on high ranked pages and social media to drive a lot of traffic. This way, people are targeted quickly, and your brand is visible in no time.

If brand visibility is your main concern, PPC comes forward as a better option.

With SEO, you need to put in some real effort in targeting the audience, be it local or multinational. And so, your brand takes time to be visible to your targeted audience. However, there are several cases where investing high in SEO and following through the requirements promoted a brand really quick.

Sustainability

When it comes to sustainability, SEO is the clear winner.

SEO helps drive organic traffic to your website instead of timely traffic. Over time, SEO establishes your credibility and reliability. As you rank on the top on Google and other search engines, it automatically generates a perception that you can be trusted.

As far as PPC is concerned, it is not sustainable at all. People usually do not like trusting in ads. Often times, clicking on an ad leads to a scam page that results in a virus in a visitor's device. Due to the increasing rate of such fraudulent click cases, PPC is not a marketing strategy that will help you in establishing credibility among the target audience. Thus, no sustainability!

Return on Investment (ROI)

The organic traffic that comes through search engines is serious and quality traffic. It improves the return on investment (ROI) in the long run. With a paid campaign like PPC, you might have a lot of temporary visitors who were surfing over the internet just for fun and landed on your website out of curiosity.

On the other hand, this is entirely not the case with search engine traffic. No one has time to search for some random keywords and visit different websites that appear for the sake of enjoyment. Also, SEO drives long-term traffic with high potential customers, and so you have increased sales meaning good enough ROI.

A soon-to-end PPC campaign might increase leads and say sales as well, but as PPC is expensive, you will not be able to have a good ROI.

With SEO, you invest less and get more while with PPC, it is the opposite.
The Ideal Solution? SEO, and PPC.

In an ideal marketing world, investing in both SEO and PPC is the key to online success. While SEO aims at long term benefits, traffic, and sales, PPC is important to promote a recent product launched and raising brand awareness among the public.

To make your business successful, you need to keep investing in SEO every month as per your business requirements but launch a PPC campaign when you initially launch your business or launch a new product once your business establishes well and people know about it.



Taking both of these marketing strategies together and designing them in a way that they offer integrative benefits is something not every business can do. The one who learns to do this in the best way wins in this ecommerce world!