Unless you’re a company selling just one of these services there is no definitive answer to the question: SEO or PPC, which is the ‘better’ choice? They both have their own advantages and disadvantages and are ideally used together as part of an overall strategy.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Pros:
- Long term cost-effective: I’ll caveat this. It’s cost effective, provided you don’t buy the services of a company that promises to “rank 1 within a month”. Once you do rank high in search results, you can get ‘free’ traffic for a long time
- Trustworthy: Organic listings are seen as more credible than ads
- Stable traffic: Organic traffic tends to be more stable than PPC traffic
Cons:
- It’s a dark art: SEO algorithms change and it’s like mastering a dark art trying to understand them
- Slow results: It can take years to see results from SEO efforts
- Requires ongoing work: You need to regularly keep churning out effective content to maintain ranking
- Competitive: If you’re in a competitive industry (and let’s be honest what industry isn’t competitive?) it can be difficult to rank highly in search results organically especially if you’re new to the market
PPC (Pay-per-Click)
Pros:
- Page position: PPC by its’ very nature puts you high up on the page often before organic results
- Quick results: You can see results from PPC campaigns almost immediately
- Agile: You can experiment fairly easily with PPC whereas to build SEO ranking you do have to commit to chosen keywords and sudden changes aren’t easy
- Targeted reach: You choose specific demographics to target
- Measurable results: You can easily track the performance of your PPC campaigns
Cons:
- Expensive: You have to pay for every click on your ad whether they convert or not. And, in a saturated market some key terms can be costly
- You can’t stop: Well of course you can, but your traffic stops as soon as you stop paying for the ads
- Requires ongoing management: You need to constantly monitor and tweak campaigns
Using them both together helps maximise the benefit of each and offset the cons. For example, if your short on budget and need results quickly it may be worth using PPC on a short-term basis whilst you’re investing in your SEO. You can also look at using PPC for immediate lead gen whilst SEO is great for building long term trust and brand awareness, all of which are essential to your overall marketing.