This has been an ongoing debate for years now. Which is better search engine marketing tool – cultivating your organic (or natural) search engine marketing strategy or simply buying your way to the top through a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program? It is a dilemma for any savvy business that does business through the web.

So which it is? Is there a simple answer? Could it be both? Your friends at TheeDesign Studio will break it down!

PPC

When you buy visitors or “clicks” from Google or other search engines it is called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine advertising. PPC allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by paying or bidding for keywords related to what you are selling.

Here are some of the positives:

  • Don’t have to worry about trying to figure out a given search engine’s algorithm and how it impacts your position.
  • It’s scalable and controllable – you set your budget and have a decent idea of how many leads are you getting in return.
  • It’s fast! No waiting around… just fund your account and watch your results.

On the downside:

  • You have to pay to get good results. The competition for keywords has never been greater and now Fortune 500s have jumped into the space with their huge advertising budgets.
  • Researching and selecting effective keywords to bid on is very time consuming. Managing what you’re spending on keywords, measuring returns, adjusting how much you spend and intelligently playing the PPC game is a basically a full time job.

SEO

On the other hand we have “Organic” or “Natural” search engine optimization (SEO). Generally speaking, organic SEO consists of optimizing your web pages to enhance their position in the naturally occurring search results. Organic SEO consists of making sure the search engine spiders can crawl and understand what is on your web pages and that they like you more than your competitors.

You can make sure website is in good shape by utilizing clean codes and search engine friendly content that appeals to human readers, as well as spiders. You then start trying to move your site up the results by doing things like cultivating inbound links from other sites. Inbound links dictate your “link popularity” so by acquiring links that point to your web site can improve your ranking. Blogging, social media marketing and online videos are three of the more effective ways to acquire quality links.

Here are some of the advantages:

  • Organic SEO is very cost effective. The labor costs of setting up and managing a PPC campaign are usually the same or even more than the labor costs of SEO, but then there are the continuous click charges you pay after set-up.
  • Search engine positioning is relatively stable compared to PPC as positions continuously change according to your competitors’ bidding tactics.
  • “Click Fraud” is still a problem as some companies use manual clicks or damaging software that simulates human clicks from different IP addresses around the world. Your competitors can rapidly rack up your click charges. Google can detect some of this fraud but there are ways to evade this detection.

Some of the drawbacks include:

  • SEO is very slow compared to PPC. It can take months after you optimize your site to start seeing results.
  • SEO is an ongoing process. Your site will never be 100% “optimized,” it will only get more and more optimized as you put more work into it. The good news is that in the future your rankings will be better and you will hopefully be reaping the rewards of having invested in SEO.
  • SEO is not free because if you do it yourself, you’re going to invest your time. You can purchase SEO tools or hire somebody to do SEO for you, then obviously it’s going to cost you a few bucks.

So which is better? Well, it depends on your industry and budget. The team at TheeDesign Studio suggests a marketing strategy that includes both natural SEO with a well-structured PPC campaign. Our professionals have the expertise and the knowledge to work with your firm to create a plan that maximizes your budget and produces a positive ROI. We can concentrate on our search engine marketing, allowing you to concentrate on your business.

If you would like to sit down with one of our SEO Specialists, please call our Raleigh office at 919.341.8901 or fill out the contact form on our website and a member of our team will contact you!