Choosing A Digital Strategy: SEO vs. PPC

The simplest way to differentiate between SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (Pay Per Click) is that with SEO the traffic is free (organic) whereas PPC is paid traffic (as the name suggests you pay for each click that a user makes on your ad. The two are both parts of Search Engine Marketing and are key parts of making your business a presence online.

These two types of search result have a different position on a search engine results page. Ads take up a prominent position at the top of the page as they are a huge source of revenue for search engines. Different searches will have different layouts, with the knowledge graph being produced for some terms, maps for locations of businesses, images and shopping ads being shown alongside the natural search results below these.

There are different options for different results. The question that you need to ask yourself, when it comes to digital strategy is how much time and budget do you have?

• Long Time Frame – if you have plenty of time to dedicate to your business’s website, then SEO is often a worthwhile way to boost your traffic. This is a long term digital strategy as work towards SEO can take months or longer to be picked up by search engines. The effort may seem quite high, however work on numerous SEO tactics (content creation, on page optimisation, working on backlinks) has a long term effect on your business’s website, and the more quality relevant content there is, the better search engines will view it for your customers
• Short Time Frame – those that are looking for ‘quick wins’ might be better using the paid search approach in terms of their digital strategy. With a correctly optimised pay per click campaign, then you can get almost instant gratification in terms of traffic to your site and then conversions in terms of sales or enquiries. Once you’ve created a campaign and allocated a budget you can start to see traffic from paid search almost instantly. This is ideal if there is a short sales cycle.

Alongside this, you need to assess the type of competition you face. Depending on what your business does, who your target market is and how they handle their online marketing you can make an informed decision on what tactics to adopt to get the best presence for your business online.

At Zelst, when it comes to choosing the right digital strategy that every case is different and there is no one size fits all digital strategy. Different businesses are always going to have different needs, and we understand that budgets are going to vary between one business and another alongside the urgency of the campaign.

Quite often the best digital marketing strategy is to combine SEO and PPC along with content marketing in order to make yourself a highly visible presence online. PPC will help to give you a boost to the traffic levels to your site while work can be done on the SEO in order to give you a natural presence as well as content creation to help you show off your knowledge on your business’s niche subjects and be seen as an authority in order to bring in more traffic around your subject.

Contact us at Zelst today and we can help give you guidance on choosing the right digital strategy for you and your business.