If you’ve just decided to ramp up your online marketing efforts and begin looking at your options, you have probably come across PPC and SEO. These are probably the two most popular and efficient marketing methods out there, and each has its set of benefits. However, there are some cases when one is better than the other depending on your niche, budget, expectations, or goals. Let’s take a look at whether PPC or SEO is the best choice for your organisation.
What Are You Selling?
The first thing you have to assess is whether the nature of your business is suited to something like PPC. As a rule, PPC works better when people are trying to sell a product with an easy to define value. While it can work when trying to gather leads, it won’t be as easy to monitor. You’ll need to use things like tracking URLs, advanced campaign segmentation, and be great at creating ad-copy that will pre-qualify visitors.
SEO as a Brand Building Tool
If your goal is to gain leads or spread brand awareness, SEO is the best option. It has been estimated that first-page organic results gobble up over 70% of all clicks made by visitors. Out of these, over 60% is spread over the first 5 results. Pages 2 and 3 take up an additional 5.59%. That means that there is about 15% to be spread among all paid ads.
These people tend to be much more invested and engaged. Someone who clicks after a search comes with an actual purpose. Others may stumble on one of your pieces of content and decide to visit your site afterwards. People like this are already pre-sold as you’ve made a connection with them and they obviously liked what they saw enough to want to learn more. People may click your ad out of curiosity, but the engagement won’t be as high.
While some companies will use PPC for branding, many do so at an initial loss simply because they can. This isn’t something that’s recommended to someone who’s not established and doesn’t have a deep war chest.
When is One Option Better than the Other?
As a rule, PPC is a better option for people involved in eCommerce. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the single most powerful method that you can use. It can give you targeted traffic almost instantly, and it works great in niches that are not too competitive.
While SEO may not give you the same immediate results, everyone should use it. There’s not a case when you can’t benefit from having some sort of SEO strategy. You need to make sure that your site is properly coded and abides by best practices at the very least. PPC works best when used with SEO rather than exclusively.
We would suggest that you work with a team that understands both strategies and will be able to sit down with you and look at solutions. For example, Caffeine Marketing comes highly recommended as they’re one of the top marketing companies in London. They can help you with everything from PPC, to SEO, social media marketing, and more. They can also help formulate a branding and content strategy for you. They will be able to look at your business and create a strategy tailor-made for it that will allow you to use as many methods and tools as you can, and make sure that you use them properly while being able to monitor progress.
As you can see, knowing which option to choose between PPC and SEO isn’t as clear cut as many imagine. This is why you must learn as much as you can about the two and work with a team that will be able to show you the pros and cons of each for your operation.
