SEO Or PPC: What’s Right for Your Small Business

When you’re a SMEs or start-up, it is essential that you want to reach to your potential users; you want the people to know about you. The real struggle for SMEs or Startups is how they become the part of any discussion. One of the classic ways to implement any marketing strategy used in such confusion is either to use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

There are various questions raised in the mind of any small business during web marketing is "Whether I should be using SEO or PPC to drive traffic to my website?

Often PPC and SEO are approached with separate plans. Though they are dissimilar in their approaches, it is important to learn that they are part of the same domain: search. One is known for its paid clicks and another one for natural clicks. They both are suited for different outcomes and can be complimentary for any business if utilised together.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

SEO is a strategy to maximise the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. It is an organic process of generating the lead through the results on search engine. SEO gives the link to the related websites as per the keywords typed by the users (depending upon the high-quality content of the website). Content marketing in many sights depends upon the SEO keywords to generate customer-centric content. Though SEO and Content Marketing are two different approaches, but they work together. SEO creates the demand for keywords and content

What is Pay-Per-Click?

Pay per Click is the Concept available on many internet marketing platforms like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. where you market your advertisements on these platforms and pay for every click that your prospective clients (viewers) make on these ads. It is an approach of internet marketing in which the advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads gets clicked. By this, the business buys the lead to their website rather than generating leads organically. It offers an immediate ROI in comparison to inbound strategy.

Before you jump to the strategy, the marketers need to consider some several factors like the budget of the business, business goals, how quick you want to see the results.

Budget:

When deciding between SEO and PPC, you need to determine that by what size advertising budget your business can support. If the small business doesn't have enough budgets to support the PPC strategy, then it's better to opt for SEO as it generates the organic traffic to your website.

Average Cost per Click:

The term CPC refers to the price users are willing to pay for each click they receive on their ad. It is an internet advertising model which helps to drive traffic to your website in which the advertisers pay to the site when the users click the ad.

When you establish a digital marketing budget, you should also consider what other people in the industry are paying for ads for Search Engine results. Some CPC is not so cheap as they can cost up to as much as 20$-30$. Such prices can make it difficult for the small business to earn revenue at initial stages.

How fast do you need results?

Where PPC has the advantage of quick results, SEO has a benefit of generating traffic organically. PPC can be a good option for the business which has the newly established website and wants the initial boost to drive traffic. But as a result, it doesn't turn out a long-term effect on the customers where SEO compels the potential customer to reach to your website builds long term relations. Therefore, SEO is a much practical approach to implement.

Which marketing strategy is better: SEO or PPC?

The main advantage of SEO is; statistically, it tends to bring you better traffic and the leads who are interested in the content published on your website. In the case of PPC, lots of searchers have trained themselves even to ignore "paid results" completely when browsing on the search engine.

There's plenty of data which suggests that organic visitors to your website are brand loyal, trust your business, and trust your products & services. Ranking highly on Google with the help of SEO for a keyword phrase is a sign that you're credible and that you're a valuable player in your industry. These are the major advantages of SEO. Moreover, it showcases you as expertise in your industry.

Though SEO runs for long-term benefits for any business, it takes time, skills and resource to implement correctly.

Summing-up

In order to achieve the best of results, it is vital for the small business to choose the best model marketing to execute which could bring the digital presence and reach the potential customers. PPC is a jump-start way for any business to build an online presence, and drive traffic to the website. Though a holistic campaign of both SEO and PPC will work the best to boost your small business and bring out online success, SEO would be ideal for stabilising traffic, nurturing leads, and building a long-term relationship with the customers cost-effectively. Plus, SEO efforts will help your PPC results as well.