SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) are the two popular search marketing methods that generate traffic to your website. While SEO generates organic traffic to your website and is free, PPC generates traffic for which you have to pay. But, it is not always helpful for you to think of free traffic generation. It’s better to add PPC advertising in today’s changing digital marketing scenario.
Growing popularity of PPC
- Though SEO would result in long lasting results, it would take a long time – a few weeks and even months or years to see the results. While in PPC, results can be seen and can be measured immediately.
- Popularity of PPC advertising is also growing year on year. According to 2013, State of Paid Search, 72% of businesses reported that they are planning to spend more on PPC in 2014. There is 17% of year on year increase in spending on PPC advertising.
Search engines are emphasizing paid and sponsored ads
- Paid ads take big share of space (80%) on SERPs (search engine results pages), that make searchers to scroll down to see the organic results. This indicates that search engines are giving comparatively more importance to PPC ads and sponsored ads than organic results.
- When searched for a specific product with a brand name, Google is giving the images and prices from different vendors on the most prominent places of SERPs and in an appealing way that makes visitor to select and finish the transaction without visiting the organic result.
- Search engines are displaying the comparison chart for some products and services. That saves visitors’ time when comparing different brands or service providers. This also makes it easy for users to make purchase decisions and choose the best.
Prospective customers tend to click on PPC ads
- Generally, users with an intent to purchase tend to click on PPC ads. A recent study by SEOMoz shows that PPC ads receive two-thirds of clicks from users with an intention to purchase.
- Users would click on organic results mostly when they are looking for any information or doing research. Therefore, the conversion rate is higher in PPC than in SEO.
- When searching for a specific product, generally PPC.
PPC ads are highly immune to search engine algorithm changes and updates
- SEO requires constant monitoring and watching-out for updates and changes in search engines’ algorithms that affect website’s search engine rankings.
- PPC is algorithm independent. The position of the PPC ad on the search engines would be same irrespective of the changes and updates in search engines’ algorithms provided they have creative ad copies and well optimized landing pages.
Though PPC is 3% effective and SEO is 19% effective (source: Bright Local Survey), for newly set up businesses, PPC is a way to secure their place in business initially. They can go for SEO once they get established and acquire customers.
Therefore, for small business owners with high converting products and looking for instant visibility on SERPs, PPC is a better alternative.