When it comes to digital marketing, there are various methods you have available. Before selecting any digital marketing method for your business, you need to keep in mind your marketing budget, business types, and other essential aspects.
Digital marketing includes SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), SMM (social media marketing), email marketing, and much more. Among different marketing methods, businesses often get confused between SEO and PPC. Both are different digital marketing methods, and both have their own pros and cons.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, which is popularly known as SEO, is an online marketing technique through which businesses can drive high-quality and well-targeting traffic to their websites. With the correct SEO strategy and implementation, you can increase the quality and quantity of your website traffic.
As a website owner, the first thing you need to keep in mind that SEO is a time-consuming process. Getting instant results from an SEO campaign is not possible. Although SEO is time-consuming, the organic traffic, high-quality your website will get would not cost you any money. How much time it will take to your website for a specific keyword on Google SERP would be based on different factors like keyword difficulty, competition in that niche, your website authority, content quality, on-page SEO implementation, backlink quality, etc.
SEO can be categorized into two types: On-page SEO and Off-page SEO. On-page SEO is all about optimization activities done within the website, while off-page SEO means optimization activities done outside the website.
What is PPC?
PPC or pay per click is another popular digital marketing method used by businesses. As we have seen, SEO is a time-consuming process. To rank the website for a competitive keyword on the top of SERP (search engine results page), it can take very long. If you can’t wait long to drive traffic to your website, you can think about PPC marketing.
As the name suggests, in pay per click marketing, the advertisers get charged based on the number of clicks their ads get. Just like SEO, PPC will also help you get high-quality and targeted traffic.
PPC ads are also of different types. The most common one is the paid search ad. These ads appear when users enter search queries on various search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Usually, you find paid search ads on the top of SERP, before organic search results.
SEO vs PPC: Which Should You Use?
For businesses that are new to online marketing, it can be challenging to decide whether to invest in SEO or PPC. But, the truth is there is no direct answer to this question. The reason is both are different internet marketing methods, and both have their own pros and cons.
Some businesses use SEO; some use PPC, while many businesses use both – PPC and SEO. Before choosing any of these two, keep in mind your marketing budget, focus keyword, competition in your niche, etc.
The good thing about investing in SEO is it helps to grow website traffic in the long run. And, the good thing about PPC is it can help you generate instant site traffic.