The debate between SEO and PPC seems to be a never-ending debate with everyone having their own opinions and preference.
To clear out most of your confusion as to which one would be more better and suitable to your website, we have come up with this guide to provide you all the information about SEO, SEM and PPC so that by the end of the article you will be able to implement them all in one or another way and know the difference between SEO and PPC.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we all know is simply the technique that we use to boost our website’s rank on google search results.
Why do we do that?
Well nobody ever visits the 2nd page of google result because 99.99% time the most relevant and useful information is present on the first page of the search result itself.
And thus, if your website shows up among top search result then it can get you huge traffic, which can result in huge benefit.
The ultimate goal of successful SEO is to achieve a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines). And the higher your website naturally ranks in organic results for a specific search, the more are the chances of it getting visited by a user.
That is the reason SEO is the most widely known and popular technique among the website and blog owners.
To make it clear for you, when someone uses a search engine to find result on “fashion handbags” the organic search engine results is where SEO technologies can assist your website in being more visible to the user and allowing them to visit your website for more information.
Most of the people start with a good website and work on SEO, but then forget the even important and necessary aspect i.e. SEM.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising can be just opposite of SEO. In SEO you use technique that naturally place your site among the top search result on a search engine, whereas PPC is the technique in which you must pay to get your ads featured on top as a search result.
Remember you are not paying to get your site organically featured on top, but to feature as an individual paid advertisement, which is different than the site which gets featured on top because of SEO. In PPC, using Google’s AdWords system you get to choose the keywords to ‘bid’ on and set a daily budget.
You get charged every time someone clicks on your adverts, hence it is called ‘pay per click’ and the higher the position and more competitive keyword you want, the more you will have to pay.
So, which technique should you go for?
The biggest perk of SEO is that it’s basically free and undoubtedly the best way to rank your site if you look at things from long term perspective.
So, if you own a website that has been around for a few years and has useful information, then you should go for SEO rather than paid PPC.
SEO is more trustworthy than PPC and 8.5 times more likely to get clicked by a user.
Whereas, the biggest perk of PPC is that you neither have to invest time nor energy and thus, if you have a new start up or website looking to gain some immediate traffic, PPC is the best option for you.
SEO and PPC are not competing services as we said SEO is considered a subset of SEM services.
Hope the guide helps you understanding all these concepts in a better and clear way.
If you have more lists to add about the difference between SEO and PPC, let us know in comments!