When deciding how to divide your digital marketing budget, you want to ensure that you are investing in the pathways that will most benefit your business. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can be a large component of positioning your company in the online ads-iverse.
Knowing the difference between Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads and the organic rankings that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can deliver is the first step in deciding where to spend your marketing dollars. Read about the differences, the similarities, and where to put your money (or save it!) when it comes to SEM.
Let’s first take a look at what SEO is and what it can do for your business.
According to Google, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of including content on your site that has the potential to improve your site’s visibility to search engines and their users. Basically, good SEO will help your company’s website appear toward the top and more often in relevant searches, resulting in more organic traffic and, ultimately, conversions. Bad SEO can make your website appear toward the bottom and less frequent to users, even when they enter keywords that are extremely relevant to your company! Not optimizing your website for SEO is a sure-fire way to lose leads and potential customers.
Most SEO strategies center around Google because it holds 92.24% of the search engine market share.
Improving your website’s SEO is a multi-step project. Here are some suggestions that will make your site SEO-friendly:
Just remember, SEO and your website’s ranking on search engines is ENTIRELY ORGANIC. You CANNOT pay for a high rank on organic search engine results. Search engines scan websites periodically and their algorithms determine rank. The more SEO-friendly your website is, the higher you will rank post-scan!
Want to learn how to rank higher in search engine results? Check out tips on how User-Generated Content (UGC) can assist in SEO ranking here.
Want to see a tried-and-true SEO case study? Click here.
So now that you’ve been briefed on SEO and the importance of search engine ranking, we can talk about PPC ads and why you might want to utilize them.
PPC, or pay-per-click, is a form of SEM where an advertiser pays a publisher every time a user clicks on an ad. This advertising model allows advertisers to only pay the publisher PER CLICK. This model was created to encourage meaningful interactions with ads on the internet and ensure advertisers get a return on their investment. An example would be Google Ads (previously Google AdWords).
PPC is a method that is largely associated with search engines because advertisers “bid” on search keywords relevant to their target users. PPC Ads are helpful when you’d like your company to compete in a crowded or highly searched market.
In search engine results, PPC Ads appear ABOVE the organic search results. When you use PPC Ads, you don’t have to work as hard (or at all!) on making your website SEO-friendly.
To clarify, PPC ads on search engines are PAID SPOTS above the organic search results when relevant keywords are searched.
When you purchase PPC Ads, you choose (or have the search engine generate) keywords and when a user enters those keywords, your ad will appear. When the user sees your PPC ad appear, believes it to be relevant to their search, and clicks on the ad, you pay the search engine money. It doesn’t matter if that user instantly exits your website or doesn’t ever become a lead, you will still pay the search engine.
As you can see, PPC Ads and SEO are pretty different. However, there are pros and cons to each.
That's entirely up to you.
Here at adWhite, we recommend taking an integrated Search Engine Marketing approach. Having a SEO strategy alongside a steady, well-built PPC Ad campaign is going to make use of the best parts of each SEM option. When combining the two, SEO and PPC Ads can double the amount of visibility that you can get in search engine results. This increases your brand's online visibility and presence. Analyzing data from both organic traffic and paid traffic will help your marketing team determine which keywords work, and nail down your target audience in order to create conversions and help your business grow.
Ready to generate leads and increase visibility? Contact the experienced, Google Ads certified digital marketing team here at adWhite.