Whenever I have come across the concept of SEO and PPC I’ve found it mesmerizing and intimidating at the same time. I’ve discussed it with a lot of people out there and most of them have been confused over these topics and have mistaken them as the same. Due to lack of clarity they tend to follow the wrong path and end up exploiting the concepts of both the fields and mess up pretty badly.

Also, if you are a designer, designing agency or belong to any other field, you must have clarity on SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and PPC(Pay Per Click). I can understand that being a designer it becomes somewhat hard to understand how search engines work, what strategies should be implemented to grow and reach your targeted audiences. But let me tell you one thing, you have to learn the basics of digital marketing or hire someone who can do it for you.

When we started Mount Woods Studio, thanks to our Founder Mr. Ankit Dhadwal who had a digital marketing background as he was also a blogger during his college days enlightening us with some of his knowledge. This gave us an advantage to kick start our work and compete within the market ourselves. So all the knowledge that he has shared with me, I’ll be sharing here with you so that you don’t get stuck anywhere. After all we all belong to a creative community.

Correct 😉

So let’s do one thing, let’s compare both of the fields and distinguish their characteristics clearly.

Alright, most of the people argue with me on the basis that both SEO and PPC are part of SEM(Search Engine Marketing) and I don’t deny that obviously they are part of it. But that doesn’t mean they are both the same.

Difference Between SEO and PPC

1. The first difference with these two is that SEO techniques are used to derive the free search traffic with optimization techniques whereas the PPC is the way of deriving the traffic through paid channels like ads and media

2. Now let’s talk about how the page positioning is affected by both of these. Firstly PPC ads positioning mainly depends upon keywords and the cost you’re willing to pay for them. In PPC, the higher you bid the higher you’ll rank. If you’re outbidding your competitors then you’ll be placed on the first page of Google’s SERP. Better the keywords research the higher the probability of ranking your website on the Google’s SERP.

Now in case of SEO, you’re going with the keywords density also but the main ranking factor according to me is website optimization. If you’ve a well optimized site with proper keywords in proper density then you’ve high chances to rank high on Google’s SERP. Mainly according to layout the SEO ranks the website in the middle of the page just below the PPC ads.

3. Cost is also a key player that helps in distinguishing these two. How does cost affect the results is what we’re discussing. As we all know that SEO is quite hard and deriving traffic from search engines can be quite tiring and requires a lot of time and effort. So paid search traffic helps in this department. But for every keyword nowadays the competition is quite high and as there is a rise in high quality websites, it becomes even tougher to rank on a particular keyword. So if you invest in a particular keyword you must have a proper budget for PPC so that you can beat your competitors and score high.

One good example of such paid traffic medium in PPC is Google Ads. In google ads you pay for the targeted keywords and the better your website quality score and keywords density the better the results you get.

4. In case of SEO there are no shortcuts. It is also an awareness message to all reading this post. As many companies out there are selling you services such as “free and fast SEO” or “faster SEO for your website” and let me tell you through personal experience that there’s no such thing as a shortcut. In SEO you just have to grind and work hard to rank your website on Google. PPC depends on the taste of advertisers. Which seems a little bit complicated and despite the efforts made by Google to simplify things it gets a little complicated sometimes.

Also, people saying they’ll do PPC at a low cost are not real because there are no ways to get any sort of concession of any kind on Google’s services. So you need to follow all steps but in PPC there are certain steps that give advantage over SEO.

5. Out of these two theoretically SEO traffic is best because you’re not paying for any kind of traffic and the traffic is regular with visitors coming on to your website 24/7. But I’ve said theoretically ain’t I. Well you can say that it’s nice to get that traffic at no cost but first of all you’ll need to put up a lot of hard work to it and if you’ve managed it you’ll get continuous competition which will make it harder to maintain that position. Here PPC seems to be the key to get first page traffic for your website.

I’m not saying it’s easy to do PPC but in this case you’ve got a great chance to maintain that rank as long as you’re having good keywords with large bids that outbids your competitors. 

6. Conversions also help in distinguishing both PPC and SEO. It’s understandable that PPC leads are more likely to get converted if you’ve got a good optimization score and you are targeting properly. Take an example of newspaper short news, these are the ads that appear on various apps, and they are well optimized, highly targeted and in present scenario the news apps are being subscribed to get latest news.

So yes PPC leads are more convertible than SEO. Another reason is that in terms of SEO the website rank for multiple keywords and might end up getting searched for the different content than that of the visitor might have searched for and that lead might not get converted due to irrelevancy. On the other hand the in PPC user will only click on your relevant ads and thus leads are generated more often in paid search traffic.

7. Ease of use is often what people compare among PPC and SEO but let me tell you that’s not the case if you’re looking for easy to do stuff then PPC and SEO might not be the fields for you. This is because in SEO you’ve to work real hard to rank your website with so much competition. If you’re going in PPC then you’ve to either hire a professional or take a course yourself to do it properly in order to beat competition and get proper results.

Final thoughts

According to me you need to do both in order to get yourself a proper mix of traffic from both paid and non paid mediums and it’ll help you understand Google’s search algorithms and ranking factors a little better. PPC can bring you traffic more easily and with PPC keywords analysis use the best keywords in SEO to rank organically on the SERPs. SEO might take time but it’ll help regulate your traffic and PPC will help in smooth transition of your traffic in the meantime.

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