The internet is a truly remarkable phenomenon. An amazing miracle of the 21st century. Most of us use it every day for various purposes such as business, entertainment and for the collecting of information. This online universe has become a vital part for most peoples lives and had proven to be an efficient tool for progressing business. The only issue is, as the internet continues to progress on a daily scale it is becoming much harder to become the centre of that universe.
As websites become easier and more accessible to make, along with the staggering mega digit number of businesses forming for the online market. It is essential to any online business to stand out significantly. This is where your SEO comes in. An SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a set of modifications that help determine where your website sits in the search engine ranking system. The higher you are to the search bar, the better chance your company has to be viewed. Roughly 80% of the traffic most websites acquire comes from the search engines, so the higher you are ranked the more of the audience you will taste.
SEO is a structured and free method in garnering your website the attention it needs. But you may be saying to yourself “hmm wouldn’t advertising do a better job at exposing my business?” Well that is where PPC comes in. PPC (Pay Per Click or alternatively Cost Per Click [CPC] ) is the use of online promotions of your website through structured advertisements pushed to consumers by various fast tier search engines (Such as Google AdWords and Microsoft Bing Ads). For every click you get on your Ad, you pay the promoter for improving your website traffic (costs will vary drastically from $1 to
$500,000 depending on how much exposure you’ll get and the popularity of the keywords associated with you)
Now you may also be asking “Well.. Which one is the better method??” As you can tell by the title of this epic, this is where we are going to find out and outweigh the costs and benefits of the two practices.
The first thing you need to know is the key differences between the two methods. SEO is a structural form of altering your website to obtain more prominence in the search engine results. These altercations can be as simple as
adding keywords that will stand out to your target audience, to updating your content regularly to avoid the search engines algorithm messing with your position on the web results. SEO is a free method which is ideal for small businesses with no budget for sponsored advertising.
PPC is the use of third party promotions to gain traffic quicker with the use of sponsorship to the search engine, in exchange for a fee with every click made of their endorsement. Although not free, you can achieve a more successful traffic in a much shorter space of time which can be hugely affective for your business as a whole.
Now lets have a look at the pros and the cons of both the methods.
SEO: The Benefits
The most valuable strength of SEO is its use of valuable content inside the website to help build overtime a trustable bond between the website and its target audience. The adjusting of the content to contain keywords and phrases help for the search engines algorithm to pick up on websites use of such words. For example if your company specialises in building conservatories for houses, then it would be ideal to use the key words of your business such as “conservatory builders” or “conservatory instalments for your home”. These words will be highlighted and used in determining what the best search result is for the consumer navigating the search engine.
The building of an outstanding, brilliant SEO will take some time and a lot of clever plotting of such contents. The benefit of this is that your traffic will become more stable and successful with the right amount of constructing with you SEO. When your website gets to the ideal point of being successful with its SEO, it will become more difficult for competitors to beat you with your search results position or traffic. It is proven that with the correctly structured SEO it will provide you with more well captured traffic. Better traffic means more trust and reliability, resulting in your website becoming an authority site. A good example of this is if you search a keyword like DVD Store, the HMV stores will show before any other small retailer.
SEO is a great way to gain the respect your company deserves and allow you to grab the attention of your audience with good planning a preparation.
SEO: The Negatives
The main downfall of using the SEO method is the amount of time it takes to build such interest. This could be testing for your business as other companies who use PPC will always be at the advantage of being pushed by promoters.
This will prove to be a challenge for smaller businesses who lack the money or time in improving their SEO.
Another issue of SEO is the usual maintenance and updates that happen regularly with search engines. Issues like this can create many problems for people attempting SEO as the changes of the search engine software can affect the position of a business on the results page. Giving an impression of your work being invalid. Because of this concern, content creators and website admins would have to make sure that their content is updated regularly to meet the demands of the transforming search engine algorithm.
PPC: The Benefits
If you are looking for a fast approach to getting as much traffic as possible for your website, then the PPC method is ideal. Unlike SEO, PPC has a higher guarantee of traffic because of its paid promotions. In most search engines such as Google, the paid promotions will be above any average search result meaning a higher chance of a PPC website being chosen first. Most PPC platforms will allow you to easily reach an audience of your choosing using their search method on who will see the add. This method makes it ideal for a niche website to reach its audience which may be obscure or thinned out.
PPC can be a great help to websites that have limited deals in need of exposure, allowing a large portion of traffic to visit your site at a short space of time can increase interest launching your site to the top. PPC is also highly useful for websites that don’t obtain or require high quality content (such a squeeze pages) and are used primarily for email subscriptions or to inform consumers of some valuable information that fits their needs.
PPC: The Negatives
Although PPC is an ideal tool for companies that need a lot of business in a short time, your websites content is the one true thing that will attract the right kind of traffic that you require for good business. SEO allows you to
space out and plan your optimisations, you are able to build a following over time and gain healthy recognition along with a more stable and reliable traffic. With PPC on the other hand, the quick pace of traffic flooding in to your webpage may not allow you to update your website quick enough for most of the audience to see. Lacking in interesting content can cause your bounce rate to increase drastically which will affect your overall search results ranking.
Its also important to note that different PPC search engines deals will have different pay rates. Some will charge more depending on your potential of good recognition, some will even charge more depending on the buzz of the keywords that you use.
PPC has a great way to reach a certain, specific audience through various sites, such as Facebook. The right attention of the right kind of audience for your product can be extremely beneficial, but once again if your website lacks in any substance that the audience will enjoy then damaging word of mouth could ensue, ruining your chances of gaining a decent reputation among your niche. You will have the advantage of paid promotions pushing you above the SEO searches, but the SEO sites will have gained respect with their thoughtful content and time to develop trust with their audience.
The Battles Fateful Conclusion:
Both SEO & PPC have proven to be massively helpful in giving companies access to the business and exposure they desperately need to survive. In this ever expanding universe of the great web its important to adapt and expand along with it. It is worth noting that the battle of these two practices shouldn’t be happening, they shouldn’t be at war! Instead they must work together as best they can. Whilst it is invaluably helpful to be promoted by search engines, one must not forget the key to any consumers heart is through the content.
And whilst it seems appealing to launch with fall force to the audiences and be overwhelmed with high traffic thanks to the help of PPC, the careful thought and work going in to the SEO of a website can be just as advantageous. The most important thing for any business is to issue a promise to their audience, the promise to provide them with a service suited and shaped for them. At the end of the day if your company offers this along with great content and a backlog of epic work, then your time in this universe could last an infinity.