Are you faced with a limited advertising budget? Are you trying to determine whether to invest in either PPC or SEO? Want more traffic on your website, whether organic or paid? Now, it is preferable to have both PPC and SEO running simultaneously, but sometimes this is just not feasible for everyone. In this article, we will walk you through SEO vs. PPC and help you determine which one you should invest in first and why; hopefully saving you time and money along the way.
We encourage you to first view our corresponding SEO vs. PPC YouTube video as well, where we take you through some visual explanations and examples.
SEO vs. PPC
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website for organic listings in search results. SEO is unpaid and involves creating content, building backlinks, and optimizing your website for search engines like Google.
What is PPC?
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC), also known as Search Engine Marketing, is the process of paying for the top results in the paid listings of search results. PPC is paid and involves targeting keywords and audiences, creating ads, driving traffic to landing pages, and driving conversions with advertisements.
Try SEO first
To begin, we would recommend utilizing SEO before you invest money into a PPC advertising campaign. It is great to have your paid ads at the top of search results, but ultimately landing under the ads, at the top, for no cost, can provide good, if not better, conversion results.
In our video tutorial, we show examples from the Surfside PPC Beachfront Decor affiliate site. In a month’s time, we received nearly 5,000 clicks and 221 thousand impressions through the Google search engine – all from time and work we spent on SEO. We invested our time, but did not have to invest any money. Which is helpful when you are working with a small budget.
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In addition, by using the Google Ads forecast tool on the Keyword Planner page you can determine how much this traffic would cost if we were using PPC. If you look at our examples, to get close to our 5,000 clicks, we would have to spend close to $3,000 over a month’s time. That is huge savings and good trade-off for the time spent achieving results organically.
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Invest in SEO First
Whether you are looking at SEO or PPC, your ultimate goal is to maximize your return on ad spend. The benefit of utilizing SEO first is that you will continue to get organic traffic from the top keywords for your brand. When it comes to PPC Advertising, the traffic and conversions only come when you are paying for it. In addition, if you have data from SEO, you can use your conversion rate and forecast the data from Google Ads and Bing Ads. If you start building up your SEO efforts and have a high number of pages that are optimizing well in search results, you can grow your traffic and then begin to test PPC campaigns with the money you are saving in your budget as a result of a solid SEO strategy.
In Summary
If you would like more information, including access to tutorials, we invite you to subscribe to the Surfside PPC YouTube Channel. Until next time!
