Understanding SEO vs PPC

Search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) have become household phrases to most marketers and businesses. Many of us know they are important to the overall success of your online presence and we've heard that they often work very well together but very few people really know the difference between the two.

While both SEO and PPC affect how your website ranks on popular search engines, they both accomplish this in very different ways. This is very important because 90% of people who do an online search only use the first page of results to determine what company to use or product to buy and on average about 80% never click on a PPC ad. This does not mean PPC is not important, but you need to know the averages to understand what you are dealing with.

Search Engine Optimization:

Implementing a solid SEO strategy is going to be the foundation of your online marketing efforts. The
techniques you use should have lasting benefits that will increase the success of your site in the long term. As long as you are implementing ethical “white hat” or borderline “grey hat” SEO techniques, you should be able to grow the organic exposure and drive new traffic to your site with 7-30 days. Most companies are implementing a combination of white and grey which in my book is completely acceptable.

Obviously the goal of SEO is to get free traffic. While the idea that this traffic is “free” is not usually the case because you either have to hire a marketing company to implement/execute the SEO strategy or you are doing this work yourself. And as a business owner, your time is never free. To get this traffic, you typically research some core keyword phrases that work well for your industry, and expand on those to incorporate some long tail keywords. Creating an overall keyword theme for your site will certainly help expedite the results. Integrate these into your content (Title Tag, Meta Description, H1, Content, Internal Linking). This is the basic idea, but there is a lot more to it that we cannot possibly cover in this article.

Now you need credibility, link juice, Google love, PageRank…whatever you want to call it, or all of the above. The way that you accomplish this within an SEO strategy is by increasing the number and quality of links back to your site. Google is in the business of making money and they do that by providing the best search experience to their customers (you and me). In a nutshell, their goal is to provide the most relevant web site matched to a specific search phrase and provide the user with several options to choose from.

However, for any given search, there could literally be millions of sites that mention that search phrase somewhere on the site. Google also uses a bunch of other criteria to arrive at a site they believe is the most relevant and so on down the line. Typically, a site that is well optimized for the search phrase, and has a lot of quality contextual links (link on someone else’s site + search phrase in the link pointing back to target site). The links preferably should be contextual, but this isn’t a requirement either. It really depends on how many sites are targeting the exact same keyword phrase and how aggressive they are targeting it for you to rank on page 1.

Geo-Modifiers will be used to narrow the results if someone is looking for a local business, and Google will do that by looking at the IP address where the search is being done and comparing it to the locations of the websites that match. Typically just adding a location to your search

As mentioned previously, 80% of searchers will only click on the organic results so it becomes very important for every company to have some exposure here. But just relying on SEO or Pay Per Click to get traffic is a fools game. SEO can take months to see results, while PPC you can potentially start getting traffic over night. And with SEO strategy, your PPC Quality Score (every search engine has a system for rewarding sites that are well planned out and that align with the search phrase) will most likely suffer causing you to spend more per click then is necessary. Make sure you have some SEO work done to your site even if your entire online strategy revolves around PPC.

The biggest downside to SEO is that you have no control over whether or not your site will ever show up in the search results, and for some phrases it can literally take years to get on Page 1. SEO requires a consistent time investment and has become so complex that it is difficult for most companies to implement a strategy that generates results without hiring a full time employee or two, or outsourcing to a reputable marketing firm.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is essentially a way to pay for “air time” for your site on Google, Yahoo, Bing. PPC ads
are the ones displayed typically at the top and sides of a search engine result page, also known as sponsored links. A PPC campaign is composed of a group of keywords and phrases that you are trying to target along with your ad copy. Each keyword you can select a bid amount for and depending on the keyword phrase you covet to show up on Page 1 for, your bids will vary considerably. You set a daily ad budget and your ads will start appearing and you will get charged each time someone clicks on your ad.

Basically you pay to show up at the center or right hand side of the search results page with the other paid results. This is very effective because a well thought out PPC campaign can ensure that you are being seen every time a certain word is searched (depending on the budget) and allows your site to start getting traffic overnight vs monts later with SEO. Ultimately your PPC listing is a mini-advertisement even if it isn't clicked on, it gets your name and product in front of your target consumer.

The downside of PPC is that when you stop paying to be seen at the top of the paid search list then you are instantly removed. You would have to pay forever to ensure you would always be visible on the major search engines. PPC is also getting very competitive in just about every industry. This is driving up the cost per click (CPC) and the cost per acquisition obtained through these campaigns. Also, Google is getting extremely picky about what types of companies can advertise through their PPC program (AdWords) and the rules they have are several pages long. PPC also requires constant monitoring on a daily basis to optimize the campaign to ensure that you are getting the most from your advertising dollars.

Using both SEO and PPC together typically provides the strongest method of increasing your visibility within the search engines.