The Differences Between SEO and PPC Advertising

Regarding promoting and growing your website, digital marketing is a tried and tested approach. It can attract new customers, help your business thrive, and increase your brand awareness. The term digital marketing covers a huge spectrum of different services and techniques, but two specific areas of the industry that are most well-known. SEO and PPC are both used to drive traffic to a website, increase digital presence, and ultimately boost sales too. Search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are both great ways to nurture new leads, but they are both very different strategies. Here we will assess the differences between SEO and PPC advertising, to help you choose which strategy will be right for you:

Opposite Ends of the Spectrum 

While the goal of both SEO and PPC is the same, the strategies they use to get to that goal are at opposite ends of the spectrum. The focus of SEO is on driving organic traffic to your website, by optimising your website content so that it appears higher on Google’s organic search rankings. By contrast, the focus of PPC is on choosing the keywords that you want to appear at the top of Google’s search listings, and then achieving that position by paying to appear there: you then have to pay Google for every click-through that is achieved.

SEO Versus PPC

The best way to boost the organic search (SEO) of your website is to write blog posts and articles with a focus keyword that is the one you wish to target via the search engine. This keyword should be the main topic of your piece, and the information in your article or blog post should be relevant, informative, and useful: otherwise, you may get users to land on your page. But you won’t get them to stay. You should also ensure that all of the permanent content on your site, including but not limited to, landing pages, reviews, and testimonials, about us pages, and services are also optimized to drive as much traffic to your site as possible.

PPC works very differently, with less focus on the keywords used in the content of your website, and more focus on picking (and paying) for the right keyword clicks. PPC is a form of advertising, where you are paying to drive traffic to your site, meaning that it is likely to work much faster than an SEO strategy, but it is also likely to be more expensive. When you choose to use PPC as a business growth strategy, you can customize and personalize each of the ads you display to reach a specific audience.

The main differences between the two strategies are that SEO will improve your online presence, and increase the quality of your website, while PPC will drive more traffic to your website, quickly driving search engine users to your website and giving you the opportunity to turn those clicks into conversions.