SEO or PPC – Which is the better digital marketing tactic for an enviably plumper sales pipeline?

SEO or PPC – Which is the better digital marketing tactic for an enviably plumper sales pipeline?

For the uninitiated, there’s been a confusion whether to use PPC (pay per click) or SEO for your website.

So, it is organic traffic or paid search traffic for your business? Every business owner must decide the marketing budget that they need to prioritize for SEO or PPC. SEO is sustainable and is known to give you results for the long run but PPC, on the other hand, can get you leads and conversions in a jiffy. It especially is a tough call if you’re just starting out or have a small marketing budget.

SEO is a tactic to push your search engine rankings. It includes some basic steps like researching the most suitable keywords, working on the on-page SEO strategy to explore the how keywords will best blend with your website, making your website faster, optimizing content and images and building highquality links to let the search engines know that your website is ready for a high ranking. The results of SEO are visible over 3-9 months as organic listings. SEO makes a long-standing solution as you tend to keep the organic listings high if you keep working on the latest SEO trends and algorithm updates (this is one of the biggest pain areas of SEO, i.e. to constantly keep abreast with the algorithm changes and make the changes before your competitors do).

For the longest time, PPC has been known as a strategy to place ads on top of Google Listings. The more you spend, you increase your chances of getting visibility, clicks and more business. With this method, you pay users per click to visit your website each time they click on an online ad. You pay an expert to

run a campaign and you can control the ad budget. PPC can give you instant results and high visits to your website. PPC is not a permanent solution and it stops as soon as you stop paying for the ads.

As a digital marketing expert, I’d like to say that it’s a tough choice. You must invest in SEO and keep your fingers crossed for astounding results. While PPC will give you instant results but you must invest consistently. Even though it’s a tough choice, there are some factors that can help you decide.

1. Understand your brand/ product/ services The kind of business that you’re in can help you decide the weightage between the two. In case you are offering niche services or products, SEO will not make any sense for you. If you understand your product/service/ audience well, you can devise a content marketing to get your brilliant SEO results. You wouldn’t need PPC as much.

PPC will work better for businesses that offer innovative products since no one will be searching for your products on search engines.

When you’re not sure about the right keywords, it’s good to run a PPC campaign to identify the topperforming keywords to run a successful SEO campaign.

If you need to show ROI, PPC is a better strategy as PPC results can be measured instantly.

2. Understand the market that you wish to enter If you’re considering breaking into a market that is mature and saturated, PPC will make you wonders (and it also happens to be an excellent way to find out the keywords that work).

3. Determine the purpose of your campaign Brand awareness, more website visits, more sales, or something more – you need to identify the topmost purpose for your marketing campaign. Depending on the purpose, you can determine if SEO or PPC will work for you to fulfill the campaign purpose.

4. Determine the desired timeline We’re talking of the timeline that you need results. PPC can give you instant gratification (if executed seamless and properly) compared to SEO. It takes a while before SEO rankings climb up the Google Listings.

You will keep getting organic traffic as long as you maintain your top position on search engines. In case of PPC, you pay more and get more clicks on your ad and website.

5. Depth of your pocket You don’t pay to get SEO rankings – you pay for SEO services, which in due course can get you high rankings. In PPC, you pay each time a user clicks on your ad. It may or may not lead to a conversion. The Google Keyword Tool to calculate the amount you can pay.

6. Conversions Though not sure shot but the SEO traffic may not always convert. It’s something like your social media followers (all your social media followers may not be great prospects). there’s a higher likelihood for

traffic from PPC to convert as you use highly targeted keywords. But yes, it comes with a higher price tag.

Perhaps a blend of both – SEO and PPC As a digital marketing agency that has extensively worked on both SEO and PPC projects, I recommend our clients to run a small PPC campaign (if their budget allows) just to test the waters.

SEO can gain momentum over a matter of time (and the keywords can be refined with the results of the PPC campaign). There are some businesses that run both SEO and PPC aggressively (and of course they have the budget to do so) but there’s no right or wrong or a perfect recipe. Google Analytics can help you understand the conversions that come from your PPC campaign and the ones that come from SEO. Only after understanding the analytics and deciding what works best for your business over the other, you can allocate the marketing budget more to either PPC or SEO. You need to clearly understand your requirement.

You need to base your decision on – budget, time, competitiveness, your brand, product, services, your audiences (yes all that work to go in your Digital Marketing Strategy). It’s difficult to choose one over the other. You might need to prioritize one over the other (depending on the factors that I extensively discussed above).

It’s not an either-or choice (in most cases). SEO and PPC, when combined, can be quite powerful to reinforce your brand over search engines. You need to reach an optimal mix of the two for a best digital marketing strategy.

If you’re still unsure about what can work best for your brand or the best approach for your digital marketing strategy, we can have a chit-chat.

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