We often hear about these two terms whenever we talk about Digital Marketing. Sometimes we even see experts arguing about the emphasis of one over the other.
Some say that SEO is easy while others say it is easy to rank through PPC marketing. Some support organic marketing like SEO and promote webmasters to follow white hat SEO practices. While very few but important niches advice on using PPC advertising to rank our websites higher up in the search result pages.
Both, SEO and PPC create a debate around who holds superior limelight in the eyes of the websites.
Before, deciding which let us get clear about what these two abbreviated terminologies mean based on their technical definitions.
What is SEO?
SEO is an abbreviated term which means Search Engine Optimization it is an organic method of improving both the quantity and quality of our website traffic. SEO is the practice to bring free traffic to our website.
What is PPC?
PPC is the abbreviation that stands for pay-per-click advertising. In this type of technique, websites rely on some of the paid ad campaign running sites like Google, Facebook, etc. to rank their websites or webpages higher up in the SERPs.
Now, after knowing what SEO is let us know why it is important or why it has an upper hand as compared to that of PPC?
- SEO is ahead of PPC because it allows you to get free traffic.
- SEO practices can help you build trust and credibility in the eyes of users who might click on your web pages.
- It can help you earn increased ROI as it requires absolutely low to nil investment.
These are some of the important advantages of SEO but as it is said no coin would have only one side i.e. everything which exists on this earth whether it is a technique or a thing always has both advantages and disadvantages to it.
Below are some of the disadvantages of the term SEO.
- SEO at the initial stage is very difficult to rely on, due to one of the filters of Google which is named Sandbox, in which Google wouldn’t allow new or infant websites to rank higher in the SERPs or would rank them very lower in the result pages.
- There are various SEO-related terminologies that might be difficult to understand at the very beginning of the SEO implementation, that anyone as an SEO Beginner may unknowingly commit a mistake that might somehow harm Google guidelines.
- SEO is also difficult if the webmaster has no idea about where to start the implementation process of SEO.
Now, after getting familiar about what are the disadvantages of SEO. Let us move forward and get ourselves clear about the advantages and disadvantages of PPC before knowing which of the two has the upper hand as far as our website ranking is to be concerned.
The below-mentioned points are the advantages of PPC (pay-per-click):-
- The first and important advantage of PPC is hidden in its full form itself i.e. pay-per-click where a webmaster who intends to leverage the fruits of advertising via running ads through Google’s advertising platform like Google AdWords needs to pay a certain amount which he/she intends to pay only when a user clicks on their ad or vice-versa.
- The benefit that PPC provides is that all the ads that a user creates would be solely run by Google or Google-related Partnering Programs. No, involvement of humans would be found after the ad is created.
- The ads that Google runs would get featured at the very initial top of the Google SERPs.
Now, these were some of the advantages of implementing PPC advertising. Let’s head towards the counterpart of the same i.e. let us know why a PPC marketing campaign should not be implemented.
- Despite, being so easy to understand and formulate PPC marketing can hinder and promote loss of money and time because in PPC marketing Google’s AdWords Campaigns run on the auction basis where advertisers need to choose certain keywords on which they intend to bid in order to win the auction. If this selection of keywords is not carried out efficiently we can end up bidding on wrong keywords and thus can move towards making a loss.
- Setting an estimated bid can sound to be more difficult in reality, because we would obviously don’t know what competitive bidding our competitors would set before entering the AdWords auction.
- After relying and winning the AdWords auction still we would uncertain if a user will click on our ads or not as there would be three ad slots and if we are placed third then would we benefit by generating any clicks as compared to the other ads or not is totally uncertain.
Now, while deciding which one to choose would be a difficult task as far as ranking our website is to be concerned. Because, both SEO and PPC incorporate some advantages with a little spice of some disadvantages it puts up a heavy dose of workload on us to choose either of one in order to rank our website and bring in hands of traffic.
Either of the two holds better limelight in one or the other aspect of the website ranking pedagogy. If one is easier in finding and bringing in the paid traffic based on keywords the other is leading and helping in maintaining better ranking based on the content.
So, based on the pros and cons of both SEO & PPC we should try to carry both hand-in-hand inside our bucket of website ranking and growth practices.
So, at last, we should try to use both organic and inorganic methods together in order to help ourselves in ranking our websites and also delivering impactful content which can be consumed by our fellow traffic in order to invite handsome conversions on our webpages, and thus, we can help our business and organization to better or ROI and also on the contrary increase our backlinks
Guest article written by: Rahul Karia