What works best – Organic SEO or PPC?

As with most ‘what works best’ questions the answer occupies a grey area somewhere between the two subjects. In this case the showdown is between Organic SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

For a modern marketing strategy this is the equivalent of the Beatles vs Rolling Stones debate. In order to answer this question, we must first define ‘best’, the aim of advertising is to bring more traffic to the company’s site and sell more of their product. Therefore, what helps a company make more money – Organic SEO or PPC? PPC If you are looking to jump-start your marketing campaign and create immediate traffic then it’s best to start with PPC. The control that PPC offers is very useful for a short-term all-out assault campaign. An individual who has had PPC training will be able to create a precise marketing campaign that will produce results quickly. PPC offers a range of benefits for the user, starting obviously with the position of ads on the page. If your ad is placed at the top of a search engine then everyone who searches for the product will see it, this means that every search is an opportunity to increase traffic and make money. This reliability helps many advertisers feel comfortable if a catchy title or visual shopping ad is included then the advert will be seen as even more reliable by the customer. The control and precision of PPC is another reason for its popularity. It is easy to tightly control your PPC budget, by restricting how much you are willing to spend each day and removing adverts quickly if they become too expensive. Precision is also key, PPC adverts are laser-targeted to be seen by as many potential customers as possible, they can be targeted by search words, geography, device, time of day and day of the week. This combination of budget control and targeting again helps advertisers feel comfortable, a company with a quality product and a sophisticated PPC campaign should see results quickly. PPC adverts are not limited to search engines like its rival Organic SEO, it could be more reliable to place your advert on a website which gets strong traffic and has customers similar to yours. Location is vital, the user may trust an advert on the side of their favourite blog more than one at the top of Google. However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the world of PPC, while you can control your budget, one must start PPC advertising knowing that it can quickly become expensive. While this is not always the case, if your company is targeting entire countries then awareness of the cost is vital. Organic While PPC is the marketing equivalent of a 100-meter sprint, Organic SEO is a half-marathon. Organic SEO marketing requires patience and an understanding that the traffic generated may be smaller but is of a much higher quality. As it is more of an endurance event, Organic SEO is a much more sustainable method than PPC, while it is not free as it will take up employee time, it is much more cost-efficient than PPC. Because the majority of Organic SEO’s cost is employee work time there is no trade-off between clicks and sales. After all of the work in getting your website to the top of organic results the payoff is a strong relationship with customers, your website will be seen as credible and trustworthy because it reached the top through ‘organic’ methods. Many adept users now scroll straight past the top banner of adverts on search engines because they know that the organic results are of a better quality. This means that the users visiting your website thanks to your Organic SEO marketing strategy are higher quality traffic. The higher quality of the web traffic attracted by Organic SEO campaigns has been statistically proven. If your website is in the top five results from a Google search, you will be getting more traffic and these customers will trust you and will be happy to buy from you. Like PPC, Organic SEO marketing is not perfect, the top spots on search engines are regularly taken by industry giants like Amazon or eBay. If that is the case with your product it might be useful to start producing content on your site in order to attract users in a different way and then market your products from there. While Organic SEO is marginally better than PPC, the best strategy is a combination of them both. This would obviously be very expensive but the end game could make the initial spend worth it. The initial sprint of PPC would attract a solid amount of medium quality traffic, which could hold the fort while the marathon of Organic SEO gets into its stride. This combination could be the perfect blend to help kick-start your business. We know it takes time to audit your website for SEO value, and creating and managing PPC campaigns is a process, so why not contact Holograph for more information on SEO support and PPC management?