Difference between SEO and PPC:
SEO is purely an organic technique to get visitors on the website from search engines without paying a single penny to them, while in PPC Advertising we need to pay for each and every click when ads appear on the sponsored listing.
SEO is a long term organic activity which needs at least three months to get a good visibility on search engines. It needs various optimization and marketing that help to improve organic keyword ranking.
Pay per click advertising purely works on a bidding strategy; the advertiser who bids high for keywords, would gain a higher ad position in the sponsored listings on search networks. There are various advertising types we can use for pay per click ads like text, banner, contextual, native etc.
Why SEO is better than PPC?
Leads generated through SEO activities are more qualitative than PPC ads, as we get a greater number of genuine users on the website, through organic searches. However, we can get more leads through PPC ads than SEO, as we pay for it directly to the publisher (ad network).
We have recently done a research of leads quality, generated through various activities like SEO, SMM, and Emailers and found that SEO still leads among all. We ran one campaign for a home loan provider in Los Angeles who specifically wanted to check the conversion rate of all campaigns. We created one dashboard that tracked leads coming from different sources. Client then gave us the leads conversion data that converted into appointments.
We got following lead conversion (appointments) data:
- SEO: 30%
- PPC: 15%
- Social Media: 8%
- Emailers: 5%
The above figures show that SEO is much better than PPC ads. Social Media Marketing, Guest blogging and influential marketing have become popular marketing techniques which help improve organic ranking of the website. The submissions of products pages through social bookmarking, forums, directories, blog commenting etc. has become an outdated technique which doesn’t really help improve ranking. You need to resort to various Non-SEO techniques that will drive referral traffic to your website i.e. social networking sites, social networking groups, communities, guest blog sites, forums etc.
Conclusion:
Search Engine Optimization is a long term organic activity which needs various technical and optimization activities. SEO is more dependent on social media marketing, influential marketing and guest blogging. We will discuss about that thing in the next blog. SEO was a leader in digital marketing; is still a leader and will always be a leader in the Digital Industry.