It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger hungry for clicks or a small business trying to drive traffic (and paying customers) to your ecommerce website. There’s no escaping this fundamental truth… It doesn’t matter in the slightest how good you are at what you do if nobody knows who you are. As such, whatever you use your website for, it behoves you to take steps to make it more visible to those who need to see it most.
Even if you’re new to the digital world, you’ve likely heard of PPC or Pay Per Click advertising as well as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Both are popular terms that can be bamboozling to newcomers. Nonetheless, they can provide the key to unlocking your website’s potential. But which is best for you? Let’s take a look at both so that you can make an informed decision on behalf of your business or creative project.
PPC: The benefits and the caveats
PPC advertising is the use of paid ads to get your message across on Facebook. As the world’s largest social platform, no matter who your target audience may be, there’s an excellent chance that there an active Facebook user.
The great thing about PPC is that it allows you to deliver highly targeted campaigns to Facebook users within a particular age or geographic range or who have certain hobbies and interests. As such, PPC is a highly effective way of getting your message across to the people who need to see it without wasting time or capital trying to communicate with the wrong people. And the beauty is that because it’s Pay Per Click, you only pay when a user engages with your post.
However, while PPC can give you a wonderful surge of interest in your website, don’t be surprised if that interest isn’t sustained after you reach your allotted PPC limit. Unless you have something else to back them up, PPC campaigns can run out of forward momentum.
SEO: The benefits and the caveats
Whatever your website is used for, there’s a good chance that it faces some stiff competition. And in an age where consumers and web users alike are growing increasingly fickle, despite a fortune being spent on garnering their loyalty, you need to put yourself ahead of that competition. That’s what SEO is all about. It’s about positioning yourself in front of the crowd in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) so that you’re there when your audience needs you.
SEO is a rich and multifaceted discipline and a number of things affect it. Some key SEO considerations are;
- The size of your website
- How frequently you update it
- Your effective use of keywords
- Whether or not it has a secure certificate (Google will penalise sites that don’t).
- How much users move around through your website
- How many internal links you have (ties in with the above)
- How long users spend on the page and how deeply they scroll
- Links to and from high authority domains (Moz is a great resource for finding out domain authority).
- How much traffic is drawn to your site / pages
- And much, much, much more
SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a never-ending battle that needs to be waged on many fronts. Climbing your way up the search engine rankings organically can take a lot of time and effort which is why so many businesses and webmasters turn to digital marketing agencies to help them get the inside track.
PPC and SEO together: A game of two halves
As you’ve no doubt guessed by this point, both PPC and SEO are both effective solutions but neither is fully effective. PPC can give you a useful boost in reach, but needs to be supplemented by organic means of boosting your online visibility to be fully effective. Likewise, taking steps to improve your SEO can help you to grow traffic organically but can take a lot of time.
Combined, however, PPC and SEO can make an effective one-two punch that leverages PPC to create a surge in traffic to your website while improving SEO to make sure that initial surge is properly capitalised upon.
How we can help decide whether Pay per Click vs SEO
As a seasoned digital marketing, we are intimately familiar with both SEO and PPC. With our extensive knowledge and collaborative work ethic, we can work with you to harness the potential power of both these tools to achieve your long and short-term goals.
