Importance of a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy cannot be overstated. Brands are fighting to get a share of the virtual market. The advent of digital marketing has dramatically changed how businesses function today. A quarter-century ago, the media was dominated by newspapers, television, and radio advertising. However, fast forward to today, brands are figuring out strategies – SEO vs PPC, or just SEO, or just PPC, or both and how to fit in social media in their entire marketing strategies.
In today’s virtual marketplace, Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization are two of the most powerful tools you can utilize to grow your brand. Both are invaluable for increasing your visibility and developing a strong customer base. When to pay for traffic and when to optimize is a tough decision if a firm is just starting out. Let’s start going over the basics of each of these concepts.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO is the process of optimizing the website content to match the user’s intent and find the best answer to his/her query. The year 2020 has brought in a fresh perspective to all facets of digital marketing. Search engine optimization is no more a choice, but crucial to scale any business. The sooner you include SEO strategy in your entire business growth plan, the better. Search Engine Optimization is a long-term strategy while Pay Per Click is a short-term strategy.
Search engine optimization has come a long way. SEO as a profession has evolved so much and encompasses technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. All these factors combined along with Google’s ever-changing algorithms, search engine optimization is now considered both art and a science. Art because it takes creativity to write appealing content for humans to engage with your site. Science because you still need to understand processes and algorithms that help your rank higher on the search engine results page.
Technical SEO consists as the name suggests all the technical aspects including
- Site architecture
- Rich Snippets or Schemas
- Robots.txt
- Sitemaps
- Core web vitals and Page experience
On-page optimization consists of
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Alt tags and image tags
- On-page quality content
Off-page optimization consists of anything to do with acquiring backlinks and listing your sites. Most popular techniques include
- Influencer outreach
- Link building – Link exchanges are still debatable.
- Mentions on good PR sites or sites with good domain authority.
What is Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)?
Pay Per Click Marketing refers to a strategy when advertisers pay publishers for displaying ads on platforms and driving traffic to the advertiser’s website. These could either be search ad campaigns or Display campaigns on platforms like Google, or Bing, or other advertisers. The bid strategies can differ – it could cost per click, cost per 1000 impressions, or more automated strategies such as target impressions, or maximize clicks or maximize conversions.
Paid marketing algorithm works primarily on 3 things: bid-budget, ad rank, quality score.
Bidding on keywords or placements in PPC ads decides how many people get to see your ads in simple layman language. If you’re bid is too low, the platforms will not deliver your ads and your competitors will get more real estate.
Quality score is a metric that considers the ad copy and landing page relevance and matches it to the searcher’s intent. If you have a high-quality score, the chances of your ads appearing in the auction are much higher and vice versa. The higher the score, the lower the cost per click.
Ad rank is what decides which place your ad gets depending on keyword relevancy, ad texts, and landing pages.
Does PPC (pay-per-click marketing) help with SEO (search engine optimization)?
Undoubtedly and absolutely, Yes! Popular to contrary belief, PPC does help with organic listing on search engines. I have tried and tested a number of experiments to say this with conviction: PPC results in higher traffic and higher engagement lead to better ranking in the Search engine results page (SERP). For keywords related to the products or services that your brand offers, you should look at utilizing any available real estate on the SERP. And nothing is better than utilizing both the top organic listings and ad slots available. This will help keep away the unwanted competition at bay that’s trying to steal your traffic.
Compared: Search Engine Optimization Vs. Pay Per Click Marketing
| Search Engine Optimization | Pay Per Click | |
| Strategy | Long term growth strategy | Short term growth strategy |
| Cost | Almost free of cost as listing on SERP is free, keeping the resources cost aside | There is an initial investment involved apart from the cost of the resources |
| Objective | Brand awareness and visibility | Laser targeted visibility |
| Time to execute | SEO strategies include a holistic content strategy including a variety of content and hence time to execute is higher. | You can start running PPC campaigns as soon as your persona is ready along with meaningful landing pages. |
| Lead Quality | The quality of the Leads is much better since the searcher’s intent is known | The quality of leads gets better with time and conversions |
| Traffic | Traffic is higher if you manage to get a higher listing on SERP. | Traffic stops when you pause the campaign. |
| Conversion Rates | 2.4%* | 1.3%* |
*Conversion Rates Across All industries
This article was originally published at Go Digital With Saya.
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