PPC Vs SEO – a balanced approach
I have come across a number of SEO diehards who seem to believe that PPC is some form of online advertising evil. You can read a number of blogs, or attend various presentations that try to point out the failings of PPC and how SEO is superior in every way.
In my opinion this is somewhat short sighted.
SEO and PPC should be used to support one another and ensure you are developing your online strategy effectively. Does this mean that you have to do SEO and PPC together or have the same agency run both… no, but I will go into that in more detail in the next blog.
There is no point me listing out the advantages of PPC over SEO, (there are many) in answer to these SEO fanatics. However, I have just tried to point out a few areas in which the these disciplines can work.
Here are some points to consider:
– PPC can provide you a quick set of results to ensure your long term investment in SEO is aimed at the correct keywords. There is no point at guessing what keywords to optimise, only to find out they are the wrong ones 6 months and several thousand pounds later.
– There is a huge amount of flexibility in PPC and measurable metrics that you just don’t get with SEO. It is important to leverage this flexibility within PPC. For example, putting special offers, or up coming events through PPC so that you are appearing within minutes, and deep linking to a highly relevant landing pages. All the information gathered from this can be fed back into your SEO strategy.
– Through our experience we have seen an uplift in CTR, (Click Through Rate) by having a listing within both the SEO and PPC areas. Again using both to support each other should be the approach.
Both SEO and PPC should be part of the online mix, and each have their advantages and disadvantages. Saying “use one, but not the other” is simply not the right way to look at things. Just as concentrating on online activities without considering the offline interactions, which is another common trap companies fall into.
Blog written by Luke Quilter
Hi Sleeping Giant, my company has recently been working with an agency that champions SEO and has been advising us that we need to get them working on our SEO campaign as that will provide far superior traffic to PPC (Which they are currently managing already) as well as far higher converting results.
What are your thoughts here? Although I am by no means an expert in PPC or SEO, my thought would be there is no reason to believe that one could provide more traffic than the other, however the question of which provides the higher Quality results is one i would very much like the answer too!
Regards,
Rupesh
HI Rupesh,
There is no really way to determine which will drive more traffic. Certainly if you are using PPC on a large number of relevant keywords you will get a large number of relevant clicks and traffic. The same applies with SEO, if you optimise your site for multiple relevant keywords you will eventually gain traffic on these terms.
Some people claim that people only click on SEO listings and not PPC? I have seen a number of statistics that contradict this. Generally people click on the adverts highest up the page, regardless, (probably unaware) if they are paid search or organic listings. There are thousands of heatmap images out there showing the “golden triangle” in the top left of the page.
I think the key is quality and not quantity. One issue I have seen with some agencies is their promise to drive traffic to your site. They do this by optimising your site on random terms which may not help your make a sale or gain customer engagement. It is always important to check what terms are driving traffic to your site. 1 quality search term is better than thousands of un-targeted clicks.
A round about way of answering your question I know, but I hope it is of some use!
Luke
Hello, great article!! I got you bookmarked. Thanks and best wishes
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