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Mutual Influence Of SEO And PPC: How To Correctly Distribute Channels To Attract Traffic [Infographic]
Are you trying to choose if you should invest in SEO or PPC? It is one of the crucial topics whether budgets should be distributed toward SEO or PPC or divided between both.
It depends on a whole lot of various factors. To choose which strategy to use, you need to know the pros and cons of SEO and PPC and how they can work jointly to boost your business growth. In this guide, we'll dive deep into each of these tactics and help you to decide which channel is right for you.
It depends on a whole lot of various factors. To choose which strategy to use, you need to know the pros and cons of SEO and PPC and how they can work jointly to boost your business growth. In this guide, we'll dive deep into each of these tactics and help you to decide which channel is right for you.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a consistent long-term effort to create and promote your content to rank on search engines. With SEO marketing, websites get excellent results in highly targeted traffic, qualified leads, and sales. Once you start ranking on Google, Bing, or Yahoo, brand visibility stays 24/7 for several months or years.
The reason for throat cut competition among the website owners for SEO is obvious. SEO is the only marketing channel where you don't need to pay for any lead generation, clicks, or even sales. Rest all the channels such as SMM, PPC, email marketing, banner ads, and sponsored ads need huge and consistent investment.
The reason for throat cut competition among the website owners for SEO is obvious. SEO is the only marketing channel where you don't need to pay for any lead generation, clicks, or even sales. Rest all the channels such as SMM, PPC, email marketing, banner ads, and sponsored ads need huge and consistent investment.
What is PPC?
On the other hand, PPC stands for pay per click. As the name suggests, you need to pay for every click. But still, PPC is very popular and one of the top choices for marketers.
Why?
Developing excellent organic visibility and ranking on SERPs through SEO takes a lot of time. If your competition is high, then it may take years to overrank your competitor. And there is no guarantee that you will overrank even after spending huge money, resources, and time.
Here, the role of PPC becomes super important. You can create PPC in a day and can see the results immediately.
Moreover, you have very tight control over the budget, audience, interest, and demographic features. You can run A/B testing for your paid campaigns with different landing pages and CTAs.
Why?
Developing excellent organic visibility and ranking on SERPs through SEO takes a lot of time. If your competition is high, then it may take years to overrank your competitor. And there is no guarantee that you will overrank even after spending huge money, resources, and time.
Here, the role of PPC becomes super important. You can create PPC in a day and can see the results immediately.
Moreover, you have very tight control over the budget, audience, interest, and demographic features. You can run A/B testing for your paid campaigns with different landing pages and CTAs.
Now let's understand the pros and cons of SEO and PPC in detail so that you can decide which one you should choose;
Pros and cons of SEO
Pros:
Organic growth is a testimonial of your victory over your competitors with the holistic marketing approach. As a website owner, you feel proud when your webpages start ranking on SERPs. Because ranking through SEO is possible when Google loves and rewards you, the audience trusts your content.
More than 52% of the total searches come from SEO only. So, the ecosystem of SEO is always robust and relevant to any other marketing channel.
Traffic and leads generated through organic search are more targeted and qualified.
One of the best things about SEO is the number of clicks is entirely free. You need not pay any single penny. If you do SEO in the right direction by using appropriate SEO tools and start ranking, the SERPs' visibility will be 24/7. The results are sustainable for several months and years. But in PPC ads, once your budget is gone, you will lose visibility on search engines.
In SEO, no one can snatch your ranking on search engines by paying money. But in PPC ads, ranking fluctuates as per the bidding of your competitors.
You always get a higher volume of traffic in SEO (almost ten times) and 15 times more clicks than PPC without spending heavily on ads.
Last but not least, users always trust more on organic results than paid ads.
Cons:
SEO is not an overnight task. It is one of the toughest nuts of marketing, which is not easy to crack. Depending on your niche and competition, it can take several months or a year to generate significant SEO revenue.
Google and other search engines make hundreds of changes regularly that are an overburden to the website owners. It needs a great team of SEO experts, professionals, content creators, designers, developers, inbound marketing, and the best man on the link building job. Therefore, SEO's biggest myth is that people think it is free, easy, and a sprint race. The reality is, SEO is a marathon that needs a considerable amount of investment, long-term consistency, approach, in-house highly qualified team, and more.
Keyword research, content creation, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO, international SEO are some of the pillars of SEO where you need to work hard.
One more thing where I would like to sound more articulately that there is no 100% guarantee that you will surpass your competitors and big market players even after you work on all the SEO ranking factors. SEO is not simple math or science, where 2+2 is always equal to 4. It's a perfect combination of maths, science, and art, where the combination of all your small efforts gradually drives you towards success.
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Pros and cons of PPC
Pros:
Unlike SEO, any Google updates can not affect your website. The moment you decide to rank on a search engine, you can rank, no matter your domain's age, content length, backlinks, social media traction, or even authority of your website. The results will reflect immediately based on your PPC campaign. Instantly. You can drive traffic, leads, and then sales, whereas SEO can take months or even years.
You have tight control over your budget, geography, demographic factors with a highly targeted audience approach. This way, you can target the commercial keywords and bring them directly to the landing pages to increase your conversion rate.
PPC Ads are an effective short term strategic approach. Suppose you have an eCommerce website, and during the festive season, you want to maximize your sales so PPC can give you an incredible amount of return. Similarly, if you are an ed-tech company and want to generate a deal from day one, PPC can be the best option.
For every $1.60 invested in Google Ads, you can get $3. These statistics sound quite reasonable for the marketers; almost 40% of brands are planning to increase their marketing budget in PPC only. It increases brand awareness by up to 80%.
Another beauty of PPC ads is its visibility on SERPs. The results are displayed at the most prominent position above the organic search results on the mobile, desktop, and tablet devices as the studies show that 50% of the search traffic clicks on the top 3 sponsored links.
Unlike SEO, PPC does not require a large in-house team and consistent long term efforts. You only need a PPC ad specialist who has good hands-on, creating great ad banners/copies and landing pages. It saves a lot of time, cost, and resources if we compare PPC with SEO.
Be it B2B, B2C, or B2G; data is the backbone of any business. With PPC ads, you can own a highly qualified database.
Unlike SEO, in PPC, you can quickly run A/B testing with Google Ads and identify which is working better for you.
Cons:
As the name suggests, PPC is not free at all, unlike SEO. You will have to spend a huge marketing budget and pay for every single click that visitors will make to your site from an ad. Only some of the industries get the benefit of low click costs. Industries like insurance, marketing, advertising pay more than $10 for every click.
Unlike SEO, you can not set and forget PPC ads. You have to optimize your campaigns regularly and do A/B testing to improve the results.
As I told you earlier, for most industries, PPC ads are extremely expensive. If you do not have expertise in running PPC ads, it can eat your marketing budget. So, be aware. Otherwise, your experience can be horrible.
Since you are paying a reasonable amount for getting every click; hence, in PPC ads, your conversion rate becomes a super important success metric. The more you invest, the better results you will get. But if the visitors are not converting again, it is a massive loss for your business.
You can not start PPC ads, unlike SEO. You need a massive initial budget to run ads and bring money. As you know, your website will rank until you run PPC ads. Once you turn ads off, your website will not be visible, and traffic stops. Then you can not generate leads.
Growth strategy of SEO
1
Keyword Research: it is the very first thing that you need to get done in the right way. If you have chosen the wrong keyword, you will probably drive very little traffic or zero traffic.
2
Content: content is not only the king, but it's a kingdom. Only high-quality, unique content can give you the extra edge in the eyes of search engine robots and audiences. Without inspiring and informing content, all can go in vain.
3
On-Page SEO: another critically important growth strategy of SEO is on-page or on-site SEO. You perform every possible thing on your site to attract search bots and humans. It can be a title, description, slug, URL, inbound links, outbound links, paragraph length, H-1, H-2, H-3 heading, image SEO, and other relevant tasks.
4
Off-Page SEO: when you are done with the perfect keyword research, content creation, and on-page SEO, you win the half battle of SEO. But still, to accomplish 100% significance you have to crack the toughest nut of SEO that is off-page SEO. Link building on relevant and high authority sites, guest posting on sites like Forbes, and Entrepreneurs, bookmarking, paid media advertising to get mentioned on news websites, link building from broken pages are some of the essential hacks of off-page SEO.
5
Technical SEO: all the technical SEO factors are not equally important, but again, before ignoring any of them, you must know the consequences of that. Securing your site with HTTPS, using HTML and XML sitemaps, website design with robust architecture, loading speed of your site, and ensuring that your webpages are mobile-friendly are some of the most critical factors of technical SEO.
6
Local SEO/Global SEO: SEO gives you an opportunity to make the presence of your business across the world. But all the types of businesses can not fit in one format. If your product or services are more local such as saloon, restaurant, bar, pub, sports club, swimming pool, and the like, then you do not need to waste your huge money doing national or global SEO. It would be best if you only focused on local SEO. Whereas if you are an ed-tech company, software or IT company, research, and consultancy company where your target audience can be the whole world, you should focus more on international SEO to scale and sustain your business.
Growth strategy of PPC
The growth hacks of PPC to skyrocket your business sales and revenue can be achieved through 5 major paid ad types:
- Search Ads in the form of text that usually on Google and Bing
- Shopping Ads
- Display Ads
- Gmail Ads
- YouTube Ads
Things to keep in mind before running PPC ads
Using long-tail keywords as they are more specific and qualified.
Picking up the right location of your audience.
Showing ads only at the right time.
Keeping testing and optimizing your ad campaign to get better results.
Pitching your product or service with an appealing offer that can prompt them to click and do purchase such as a mega sale offer with a heavy discount for limited hours.
Creating mobile-specific ads to get better CTR.
Creating a highly engaging and super fascinating landing page with not more than 2 calls to action. Having more than 1 or 2 CTA can divert their mind, and you can have a very less conversion rate. Remember, your homepage is not your landing page.
How is the success of a business incomplete without SEO and PPC?
If you have decided to consider only one marketing channel out of SEO and PPC, you must be aware of the consequences. If you have other marketing sources like affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, paid media, referral programs, or email marketing, you should focus on SEO and ignore PPC.
More than 52% of the searches on the search engines are done through SEO only. And the quality of traffic and leads are much more qualified than other marketing channels. Therefore, if you have a high authority website and dominate in your industry where your site is ranking almost for major keywords, you also need not spend much on PPC.
If you want robust brand visibility and a 24/7 presence on the search engines where you can establish your business's authority, trust, and effectiveness, then always choose SEO.
Suppose your business is hyperlocal such as a restaurant, saloon, bar, hotel, pub, pet care, hospital. In that case, you can do a profitable company with a mix of a robust local SEO approach and a small investment in social media marketing. You need not spend more on PPC.
On the other hand, if you are a newbie and want quick results to sustain and scale your business in the market, choose PPC.
If your competition is very high and you are not driving sales from organic search results, go with PPC. Even on the occasion of any mega deals, or a new product launch, use PPC.
If you have entered the eCommerce business and your website is new, you can not overrank your competitors' search results like Amazon, eBay with the SEO. You have to run PPC ads.
The above mentioned quick points are just to give you an idea of SEO and PPC as a business nature. But the reality for most businesses is that without the integration of SEO and PPC, their marketing goals and strategies are insufficient.
As per the study of Statista, Amazon's biggest eCommerce website, whose SEO success is far away from its competitors, still spent $8 billion in 2018 and $11 billion in 2019 on TV and paid ads, and it keeps increasing.
More than 52% of the searches on the search engines are done through SEO only. And the quality of traffic and leads are much more qualified than other marketing channels. Therefore, if you have a high authority website and dominate in your industry where your site is ranking almost for major keywords, you also need not spend much on PPC.
If you want robust brand visibility and a 24/7 presence on the search engines where you can establish your business's authority, trust, and effectiveness, then always choose SEO.
Suppose your business is hyperlocal such as a restaurant, saloon, bar, hotel, pub, pet care, hospital. In that case, you can do a profitable company with a mix of a robust local SEO approach and a small investment in social media marketing. You need not spend more on PPC.
On the other hand, if you are a newbie and want quick results to sustain and scale your business in the market, choose PPC.
If your competition is very high and you are not driving sales from organic search results, go with PPC. Even on the occasion of any mega deals, or a new product launch, use PPC.
If you have entered the eCommerce business and your website is new, you can not overrank your competitors' search results like Amazon, eBay with the SEO. You have to run PPC ads.
The above mentioned quick points are just to give you an idea of SEO and PPC as a business nature. But the reality for most businesses is that without the integration of SEO and PPC, their marketing goals and strategies are insufficient.
As per the study of Statista, Amazon's biggest eCommerce website, whose SEO success is far away from its competitors, still spent $8 billion in 2018 and $11 billion in 2019 on TV and paid ads, and it keeps increasing.
How to leverage SEO and PPC together?
Few tips where you can form a synergy between SEO and PPC together are:
1
If your product or services can delight your audience, then leads generated from PPC can be fed into SEO results.
2
You can use PPC in a highly competitive commercial keyword with a high conversion rate, whereas pushing SEO for high-cost keywords with high volume but less conversion rate.
3
You can use your organic website traffic in PPC to pitch your paid services by targeting and retargeting them through PPC.
4
Do SEO for all the target keywords to drive traffic, engagement, and ranking on SERPs. But use PPC only for commercial keywords with excellent conversion rates.
5
Increase brand visibility, trust, and beat your competition with strong organic results with SEO and paid visibility with PPC.
Finally, with my experience, research, and overall analysis, I would like to say, as a website owner, you should always run behind the SEO as it is a long term consistent approach. But when it comes to increasing sales volume, multiply revenue on some festive occasions, increase brand visibility, overrank or overrule your competitors with accelerated growth and holistic marketing approach, keep investing in PPC.
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