When planning out your digital marketing strategy, one of the salient factors that businesses often have to consider is whether they should implement or lean more towards SEO or PPC marketing. Understanding the differences between the two is absolutely key to deciphering the best approach so that you can reach yours or your clients objectives and goals.

SEO: The Long Term Strategy

Within SEO, the main focus is generating organic search traffic over time by ranking your site for specific key terms on the search engine results page. This involves many aspects, such as optimised and relevant content, site health and speed, as well as many more technical aspects which are all implemented to get search engines to favour your site.

The main advantage of undertaking an SEO campaign is that it is far more sustainable and effective in the long-term compared to PPC. Once you have consolidated your ranking positioning in the search engines, you can attract high quality traffic consistently without depending on fluctuating costs. Nonetheless, a campaign such as this will not be immediate and can take months to gain traction and start to see results. It can also be subject to change due to competitiveness, search volume and algorithm updates and many more factors. However, it goes without saying that this is the most secure, reliable and sustainable strategy of the two for overall growth.

PPC: Instant & Targeted Website Traffic

When you view the PPC approach, this involves payment for ad placement on search engines and other platforms. You will bid on your selected keywords to make your site appear at the top of search results or relevant websites. The advantage to a campaign such as this is that you can drive traffic almost immediately after a campaign launch. This method also allows enhanced targeting based on location, demographic, behaviour and more. However, this can frequently prove to be a very expensive option and once you turn off the campaign, your traffic can stop almost instantly. To achieve success with PPC, it will involve high levels of management and ample budget allocation.

So what do I choose?

Your selection is highly dependant on what your objectives and goals are as a business. If you’re looking for sustainable growth for your website both in traffic and costs, SEO is the perfect answer for your marketing practices and this is the route we like to recommend. Should you wish to receive instant results with a substantial budget, then PPC could be the alternative worth exploring.