SEO or PPC, what promotion strategy to choose?

81% of all Internet users get to the desired site through a search. Business of any size today understands the importance of online marketing, especially through search engines.

However, which promotion strategy should be placed first in importance and cost?

SEO pros

• Brand recognition: visibility in the search engines for specified key queries puts you above competitors in front of potential customers of your products or services. If users find you on commercial requests that relate to a given niche, your brand begins to be associated with this area. You become an authoritative source.
• Trust and reputation: if your website appears in organic search results, then this causes the audience’s confidence. Until now, a lot of visitors are missing advertisements and banners, preferring to follow links in search results.
• Traffic: increased traffic gives more business opportunities, both in case of increasing brand recognition, and generating leads to increase sales.
• Cost per click: traffic from organic can be called free, unless of course take into account the amount of investment and effort to get it. The increase in visibility certainly takes time and money, but there is no direct payment for every show or a link from the search results.
• ROI: search traffic can give a greater ROI compared to traditional forms of paid advertising and in general more than in PPC.
• Cost: although SEO is neither a cheap nor an easy advertising channel, it will usually be more economical than all other marketing tactics to ensure brand awareness and relevant traffic to your site.
• Sustainability: unlike paid search marketing, organic traffic does not turn off at the very moment when you stop paying for it. Thus, efforts to develop organic traffic can support the flow of traffic and, as a consequence, business, when marketing costs are reduced.
• CTR: a higher percentage of users click on organic results. Although there are exceptions to this rule, you will generate more clicks from a high organic position than from a high-priced paid ad. The results on the first page of search for users look natural, and get more conversions.
• The amount of presence for semantics: every day a lot of new requests are generated, to be present on most of them, visibility in organic is required. For the context, it would be necessary to constantly search for all kinds of new key requests for clicks or inflate budgets to advertise each part of the content on its website.
• Strategic advantage: visibility in organic search is not achieved quickly and simply – it is both good and bad. After you have achieved the results in organic, your competitors can not come to the store and just buy your positions in the issue. This can provide a strategic advantage over competitors, especially those who are just entering the market.

SEO cons

• Slow increase in organic traffic.
• Need to start with low-frequency queries
• You may need serious resources to generate high-quality content in order to achieve high positions.
• The strategy of building a high-quality and secure grid of external links is not the easiest, not everyone can master it and will often require expert support, otherwise you can easily get under the search engine filter and lose all the positions and traffic in general.
• Organics can also largely depend on information or pre-sales research requests
• Exposure to changes in search algorithms, and the constant high demands on the technical part of the site. Https protocol, AMP versions of pages, LSI texts, and so on. All the innovations and requirements from the search engines need to be implemented immediately, otherwise you will fly out of the search results.
• Absolutely no guarantees for achieving any indicators. You can spend $ 10,000 a year to reach a specific position – and not get any results at all.

PPC pros

• Position on page: paid search is shown above the content on top. Usually, there are usually four ads on desktop output and three on mobile devices. The user will always see your search ads.
• Improved communication: phone number, location, additional links, prices and callouts are just some of the options for creating ads that appear on the page. This attracts more attention.
• Visual advertising: Google provides the possibility of image ads that can help the user see what exactly you are selling. This kind of advertising can really increase the speed of a click by offering a function that is not available in a regular search.
• Branding: running paid search ads allows you to find the right people. At a time when they have not yet made a decision and are looking for your brand, search advertising can bring significant dividends to your advertising strategy.
• Budgeting: PPC allows you to tightly control costs. You just make a calculation – how much you want to spend per day, (ideally with a calculation of the return of conversions, clicks, and so on), and just fix this budget.
• Targeting: PPC provides the most accurate approach to potential customers. Ads can be targeted to keywords, time of day, day of the week, geography, language, device and audience based on previous visits.
• Speed of results: developing good visibility in organic can take a serious time, while a PPC campaign can be created in a matter of days and scaled in a very short time. There is no faster way to get clicks and potential customers than paid advertising in search engines.
• Flexibility: speed provides maneuverability. Do you want to test a new product? New marketing message? You can quickly get feedback about starting a new product or service by running a short PPC advertising campaign.
• More complete marketing data: Google closed the search queries in the analytics, because of the privacy policy, and it is not possible to determine exactly what requests bring traffic and leads. But in paid search there are no such restrictions. With conversion tracking for queries and correct integration with Google Analytics, you can at any time determine which keywords bring in conversions, what is the exact percentage and conversion cost. By the way, these data can be used directly for the strategy in organic search (SEO), as well as in other advertisements, to improve the results in all areas.
• A / B tests: it’s easy to make test ads, landing pages and even call-to-action buttons to determine what brings the greatest effect. Again, this information can be used in all other marketing channels.
• Stability: AdWords does not suffer from constant updates of search algorithms, which may affect the results of promotion in SEO. There are certainly changes, but they have much less influence.
• Cost of start: for a small local business that focuses on a small geographic sector, you can start with a small set of key queries and generate enough bids to ignore the start-up costs.

PPC cons

• Paid search advertising requires constant investment
• Context can be very costly, especially for media campaigns, targeting different countries, and a large volume of advertised goods or services.
• It is not uncommon in the context of a war for position, which can lead to increased costs. When you start running your ads, you compete with other advertisers. This can lead to ever-increasing costs.
• Strategically – PPC is relatively easy to copy. Your ads, your digital communication strategy can easily be copied and even imitated, giving out your ads for yours.
• A qualitative campaign for contextual advertising requires skilled management and optimization – from monitoring announcements, minus words, quality metrics, delivery positions to bids per click. Some of them can be done with automation and scripts in the AdWords toolbox, but if you are too busy to do it yourself, make sure you have an expert who will make sure that your account is under control.

So… SEO or PPC?

Unfortunately, it is impossible to answer this question without considering a specific business. Each site can have its own promotion strategy.

In some cases, the context works best, especially when you need a service or product “here and now”, in local targeting, such as calling plumbing, taxi, ordering sushi and so on. Also, if you have a very seasonal product, for example, Christmas toys, or masquerade eye lenses on Halloween, then it also makes sense to consider only the peak load on the context in the specified period.

Do you need any leads right now? What is the competition in the search for your products? What are the bids in the context of your products? Do you have the ability to constantly update the site and post interesting and quality content for users?

In other words, it is necessary to understand clear short-term and long-term goals for making a decision on the strategy.

SEO+PPC pros

• A key request from PPC with a high conversion from Google Analytics data can be sent to a promotion strategy (SEO).
• The total volume of traffic can be increased by adding highly effective keywords both in context and in search.
• Keywords with a high cost of clicking, but bringing conversions, can be redirected from PPC to a regular search.
• The results of A / B testing of landings or ads can be used for landing landing pages from organic.
• Remarketing allows you to re-contact with the audience that was on your site with a free search.
• The strategy of key queries in SEO, which is expensive and long-term, can be checked for conversions in the PPC before it is put into operation.
• Targeting target users from the stages of product research, to purchase through commercial requests. For example, if you brought a user with organic on the request “iphone review”, then you can, on request, “buy an iphone” to bring it to the site already for purchase.
• Increase brand awareness by a wider presence on the Internet.