I know I’m a little biased here as a PPC Expert, however, over the years I’ve seen PPC bringing in some amazing results for client accounts.
SEO on the other hand has seen a decline for all kinds of sites; from small to major ones, all struggling to make it work. Google has rolled out a wide range of algorithm updates like Hummingbird, Panda and Penguin, leaving website owners doubtful and concerned about their rankings.
So, I’ve included here some Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Insights that helps explain why I believe PPC is better:
PPC is Easy to Launch
Launching a PPC campaign is easy. You can setup a campaign in Google Ads in a few minutes and start advertising your products or services instantly. All you need to get started is a Google Ads Account, website address and info about what you’d like to promote.
So, you could start with your keyword research and gather the main keywords to bid on. Next you write some targeted ads for the keywords, and these will be structured into different ad groups. Finally, you can create the campaign and add your ad groups, ads and keywords.
PPC Traffic is Instant
Unlike SEO, PPC traffic is instant. With SEO you’ll have to wait months for your website to achieve higher rankings and to start receiving traffic from those rankings.
After setting up your PPC campaign in Google Ads, it will automatically go through a review process. This could take anywhere from a minute to a few hours to complete.
When that’s all done and ads are approved, your ads will start running and you’ll start getting impressions and clicks.
SEO is Slow
SEO is slow, especially in a competitive sector. If there are many businesses pushing for higher rankings in your locations, it could take you months or years to achieve success. And that’s especially true if your website is new and recently launched.
Google is known to have a sandbox effect that places websites on probation before they can be ranked. This can take 6 months or more and no amount of optimisation can change that.
SEO is Unpredictable
One of the main challenges with SEO is that you may put in a lot of work but you aren’t sure what results you’ll get. You won’t know what positions you’ll ultimately achieve. And it is difficult to assess how much traffic you will get from your efforts too.
With PPC, on the other hand, you can bid for positions and assign a budget that determines how much traffic you get. And you can set bids to put a limit on how much you pay for each click.
Of course SEO traffic is free, but you aren’t guaranteed to get it in the first place.
PPC allows for quick First Page Positions
Being on the first page of Google is important if you want to achieve high traffic volumes, get more website visitors, increase branding and get more sales. This is impossible to achieve if you’re on Page 2 and beyond.
SEO takes months of hard work to get first page ranking. You’ll need to do a lot of on-page and off-page optimisation and wait patiently for the Google bot to pick up the changes.
With PPC you can bid for first page positions and even determine where on the page you would like to rank. And you can do this within minutes of launching your PPC campaign.
PPC helps with Branding
Google Ads provides Video and Display campaign types that help with branding. You can reach a wide range of audiences that are relevant to your business and raise awareness for your products or services.
Image ads and videos are powerful assets for raising brand awareness and running PPC campaigns is the quickest way to achieve that. Trying to do it through SEO can be long and laborious and often the results aren’t guaranteed.
PPC dominates Above-the-fold
Google has recently changed their search engine interface and this has pushed Organic listings further down the page. So, you’ll notice there are no ads to the right anymore and they only appear at the top and below the Organic listings.
In fact, text ads now occupy up to 4 spaces at the top of the search results pages and this has helped to increase traffic to ad results.
So, PPC now dominates above-the-fold and that means you should definitely be listed there.
PPC is Highly Measurable
Yes I know, SEO is measurable too. However, PPC traffic provides more insights that allow you to see how your spend has contributed to sales. So, you can see what your return is for every $1 that you spend.
With SEO, there is less initial spending, but you will often have to work with writers, SEO experts, web developers and marketers to a make it work and it can be hard to track expenses.
