SEO vs PPC – The Pros & Cons

Let’s dive into SEO vs PPC starting with some definitions:

What are the pros and cons of PPC?

Pros:

• You can immediately get to the top of search results, beating out the competitors (if they don’t also run ads about the same thing).
• Even though it can be expensive, it is flexible and can be cost-effective. You can choose to spend as much or as little as you like.
• You can hyper-target your audience – it can break down to demographics like location, language, and type of device.
• Easily measurable. PPC campaigns can be set up to carefully measure effectiveness. You can determine exactly how much your return on investment is right away, lead by lead.
• Campaigns, Ads, and settings are fully customizable.
• It is easy to learn with lots of free online courses and training materials to help you develop your skills.
• Fast & easy to set up – you will see the impact of your PPC efforts almost immediately. Organic search engine optimization (SEO) tactics can take months to make a difference.
• You can rapidly run A/B tests with PPC ads. You can run two different sets of ads simultaneously to measure which one of them converts better.
• It can bring in good, qualified traffic while your organic SEO traffic builds up.

Cons:

• It can be very expensive if you do it wrong and don’t monitor its results constantly to make improvements.
• The improvements you make on PPC can take time. Good optimizing can take a while to get the best results. While you can get results right away, you still have to optimize to get cheaper leads. Otherwise, you will be wasting your funds. This is unlike SEO tactics where the investment is time and skills.
• It can take some time & practice to set up effective campaigns. Many businesses choose to use a specialist agency, like Source Marketing.
• Clicks and visits don’t always lead to sales, so you need a specialist to make sure you are actually getting a good ROI.

What are the pros and cons of SEO?

Pros:

• It can be much cheaper to do SEO than PPC.
• You can learn it pretty fast, if you do it yourself it’s free. There are paid experts, like myself that can help you get to the top in a relatively short amount of time, but otherwise, you can learn and do it all yourself.
• You can improve your traffic and get a great ranking to help attract potential visitors to your website. Organic searches list you at the top spot or near the top so you get the first clicks available.
• You can get hyper-specific with your targeted audience who are more willing to use your services or buy your products.
• You are more or less there to stay, as opposed to paid traffic, where you sometimes have to pay ungodly amounts to stay up on top of your rankings.
• It has a stable business growth factor to it. When you get more visitors, you get more sales. More sales help your business to grow and develop. Also, almost 60% of those people doing internet searches, are looking for someone in their local area. That could be you.
• You are in control when you do your own SEO, which means your target audience, your content, and your internet presence.
• You can compete with more established brands right away. While SEO would be a larger hill to climb against large competitors, as they have had more time and skin in the game.

Cons:

• It takes a lot more work to top the charts organically than it is to do it paid.
• It takes time. You need to wait for the actions you take on SEO to see its results. They won’t happen right away. PPC does happen pretty much right away. Search engine ranking and indexing can take anywhere from hours to weeks to do.
• Returns On Investments do not show up right away as PPC can usually do if done correctly.
• It can be relatively expensive if you want to pay an expert for a full-blown SEO strategy to rank high for a hyper-competitive keyword.
• You won’t always see results with SEO. And definitely won’t see results right away, like PPC can do.
• Too many variables and rankings can be lost in a day – Google makes large updates to their Search Engine pretty often, a minimum of once every quarter, and sometimes those affect your rankings.
• Sometimes PPC gets in the way and there are too many paid rankings getting in the way of your SEO efforts wanting to be at the top of the page.

I hope this cleared up some things for you regarding the differences between PPC and SEO. If you enjoyed this blog, please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions and if this helped you at all in your marketing efforts, feel free to check out my other blogs, thank you!