Businesses today are looking for more innovative ways to market their products. The internet has made the world a global village whereby your advertisements can reach many people using the internet as a marketing tool. There are various forms of online advertisements, with google being the dominant platform. In this article we’re going to analyze PPC via Google Ads versus and  organic search engine optimization and hopefully allow you to make an informed decision for your organization as to which is more appropriate.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is a strategy incorporated into your website to make it as search engine friendly as possible by essentially sending google signals that you are in fact the most relevant search to your customer. By climbing in the rankings and showing on higher page results, you search engine optimization improves traffic to your site and of course increases customer acquisition. When a user searches for a phrase in the web search engine, they are provided with the most relevant results that google believes the customer will click on. Therefore you need to ensure your website is on Google’s top ten list for searches by your potential customers.

5 Pros of Organic SEO

1. Highly Scalable

Search engine optimization delivers compounded results by cost-effectively scaling your site. Scalability is a significant advantage, especially if your website has a lot of web pages.

2. Organic SEO is Always Working

Another advantage organic search engine optimization has compared to pay-per-click is that search engine optimization works for your business 24/7. Thus the results act as a constant promotion for your business, without worrying what your monthly costs will be.

3. Provides Long Term Returns

With search engine optimization, if your activities are visible firmly in organic search results, benefits to your brand are not only for the short run but, in turn, increase the return on investment from your investments significantly. Although adjustments and tweaks need to be made all the time to ensure your business is always on top, the work put in forms a strong foundation that doesnt easily vanish.

4. Highly Profitable

Because its not labeled as an AD, traffic originating through search engine optimization is more trusted and engaged user giving more brand loyalty than pay per click and giving organic search engine optimization a strong edge.

5. Raise Brand Awareness

Search engine optimization raises brand awareness in the long run. If you are consistent in creating quality content from your website, your search engine optimization rankings are bound to improve with time, allowing for more and more traffic to your site.

3 Cons of Search Engine Optimization

1. Strategies Take Time

The returns are seen immediately with PPC marketing, but they vanish if you don’t pay the piper. In contrast, with organic search engine optimization, yes, the returns do take time, but the return on investment for your investment will be seen even long after your investment. The time it takes to see returns from your investment depends on several factors like the strength of your domain or the strategy you are using, but in six months, the returns start to show.

2. Google’s Algorithm Changes

Google is constantly changing its algorithm with time to improve the services provided as well as keep anyone from over-manipulating the results. Therefore, you need to constantly push and readjust your seo marketing to ensure performance does not weaken.

3. Fierce Competition

Remember, you are not the only business with search engine optimization strategies to improve your rankings. Therefore, you need to constantly plan better strategies to ensure you rank higher than your competition.

Pay Per Click Advertisement

Pay-per-click or PPC advertising is a digital marketing model where advertisers pay a fee each time an ad is clicked on search engine results. The pay-per-click model allows advertisers to target specific keywords and phrases in specific locations times and profiles.

4. Pros of Pay Per Click

1. Audience Targeting

PPC allows you to target an audience of your choice. If you want to run an ad campaign that targets searches in a particular product or location, personal profile, that’s extremely competitive, pay per click is the best ad model to take. Thus, PPC allows you to target your ad campaign to a specific audience of your liking.

2. Measurable

PPC provides immediate results from the ad campaign you are running for your brand, which in turn paints a clean and clear picture of the ROI of your campaign. Google has transparent data for pay-per-click ads thus rewarding its paying customers with crucial information that can be capitalized.

3. Easy Setup

The pay-per-click ad campaigns are easy to set up and monitor, especially if you know the tools and platform to use. Otherwise google provides detailed instructions and videos to help you navigate the process.

4. Fast Results

When you launch your PPC ad campaign, results are swift and straightforward. You want to promote a new product to the market or run a promotion or sell. The pay-per-click ad campaign is the best venture to undertake as results from your campaign will come quicker than search engine optimization campaigns.

Cons of PPC

1. No money, No Results

PPC is a form of a paid ad. Therefore, as long as you pay for the ad to run, traffic to your site will be maintained. However, your traffic goes away as soon as you start lowering your budget or stop paying for the campaign, which is severely consequential to any business. However, with search engine optimization, there is a foundation laid that ensures your traffic is maintained even after you stop pushing for the campaign to move.

2. Costly Endeavor

Pay per click is a costly undertaking that requires you to spend to get ads and, in turn, acquire results. PPC is a constant fine-tuning process that requires you to test various bids, keywords, landing pages, campaign strategies until you obtain the best results. With PPC, you never expect a perfect return on investment, and it’s more likely you lose money on failing experiments. Therefore you require a significant financial investment to avoid you losing your capital. Acquiring customer campaigns also comes at a significantly high cost in PPC.

3. Hard to Avoid “Banner Blindness”

Banner blindness is whereby people avoid advertisements. Search engines have ad blockers that help people avoid the many tiresome ads that pop up on each page you enter. Studies have shown that people lately tend to skip ads. People go directly to the organic results to find the information they were looking for, thus becoming a challenge whereby a company incorporates pay-per-click ads only to realize that their intended audience doesn’t pay any attention to ads.

Search engine optimization VS PPC Comparison

1. SEO vs. PPC Click-Through Rates

There is a massive difference in click-through rate between organic search engine optimizations and the pay-per-click. Organic search engine optimization produces far larger click-through rates than pay-per-click ads. Therefore, if you want to increase your web traffic from searches, search engine optimization is the more reliable option.

2. SEO vs. PPC Return on Investment

As shown earlier, search engine optimization provides a higher click-through rate of the two, thus driving higher traffic volumes to your site. Therefore your cost per acquisition will be lower when using search engine optimization. If your company spends a lot of money on paid ads learning how to improve search engine optimization results will, in turn, help you in cutting costs significantly. Shifting your business’s reliance on search engine optimization may prove to be more profitable in the long run though it will take time to see these results. With paid search, the return on your investments can be seen immediately. Still, they might not run as long as you want them to, unlike in organic search engine optimization, which takes time to produce results you are after, but these results can be seen years after adopting the model.

The question arising is whether organic search engine optimization or paid search is better? There is no correct answer to this question as it ultimately comes to which model is best for your business at that time. People tend to look for information online before even visiting the company in today’s society. Search engine optimization and paid Google ads can help you connect with them as they search for whatever they want. Search engine optimization boosts your google my business in that there are better chances your business will be found in searches while paid search reaches your customers more immediately. However, these forms of digital marketing impact your business in different ways. The decision is left to you to choose the best marketing model that will bring traffic to your company and bring the targeted profits you desire.