PPC (Pay Per Click) has become more popular recently and you will probably have noticed when you use the Google search engine that many ‘Ad’ symbols pop up next to the top and bottom page results. So this is leading some people to question whether it is still worthwhile investing time and effort into gaining traffic organically.

PPC and SEO: What is the Difference?

In a nutshell, PPC is where a customer pays for traffic to be directed to their website using a ppc agency, with a payment made every time a website visitor is directed from an ad placed on another website. SEO is more about optimizing your website and content so that search engines rank it highly. This is done through a range of different principles but essentially you do not pay for this, you simply spend time working on developing your website and content to make it more SEO friendly.

Which is Best?

There has been an age-old debate of which is better, ppc or seo. PPC is great if you want to get quick results and you have the budget to back it up. However, if you are just starting up a business and you have launched your first website, you probably do not have a huge digital marketing budget. So SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is going to be an important method of driving traffic to your website.

Several SEO principles do not take up a huge amount of time that you can incorporate into your website and its content. For example, the use of keywords and optimizing your meta description, title tags, alt tags, and headers. Further to this, you can create long-form, quality content that will drive people to your website, in search of the valuable information that you can provide to them. The SEO service providers will first check the website for any technical issues and then begin their campaign to get leads and traffic for their client. Contacting companies like NetSearch Digital Marketing and other similar service providers for services in Richmond SEO (if you reside in the area), could lead to profitable growth for the business.

One of the most important things about SEO is that it is a long-term result-generating method, whereas PPC only works whilst you are paying to use it. If you are good at optimising your website content for search engines then you should get consistently good results from it. However, if you are not, making use of Rivmedia SEO Services could teach you a thing or two about how SEO works in the long term. It is worth mentioning that search results for Google are calculated using a very complex algorithm to identify which websites are trusted and of higher quality. Every now and again, the clever people at Google make tweaks or larger scale changes to the algorithms essentially so that people find it harder to manipulate results.

Google’s main objective is to link internet users up with website content that is most useful and relevant to them. So they built an algorithm that analyses or ‘crawls’ the internet to rank websites according to the keywords used in the search bar. The latest technology now uses voice search as well, so it is also good SEO practice to take this into account, as voice searches are becoming more and more popular through Siri, Alexa and similar.

PPC can be a very effective way of generating leads so investing a small amount on a paid ad click if it leads to a sale will be a good ROI. By placing ads on related websites, you will be attracting qualified leads or in other words, an audience that is more likely to be interested in your products or services.

You don’t necessarily have to choose between SEO and PPC because they can work very well in combination. Which you use the most will depend on how much time you have and how much marketing budget you can afford to spend. Either way, it is a good idea to keep up to date with both methods and any trends that expert marketers are discussing.