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NEWMEDIA: SEO vs. PPC — Which is Better for Your Business?
SEO and PPC follow different methodologies and provide different types of results. PPC includes Google Ads and similar services while SEO covers a broad range of techniques. Both require some investment, but PPC requires larger budgets while SEO needs more time.
In this article, we dive into the differences between PPC versus SEO, discovering which you should be using for your marketing strategy and why.
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Get my custom SEO quoteWhat is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is the practice of making your web content as easy to find as possible in search engines like Bing, Google, and others. SEO falls under the category of unpaid search. In other words, you’re not paying to have your website positioned temptingly at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). You’re using on-page and off-page techniques (more on that later) to help searchers find relevant, quality information.
Search engines take the words in a query and look for websites with examples of those words or phrases or that answer a question the searcher posed. Search rankings are also impacted by how many other sites link to an online resource, the readability of the content, and how unique it is. When your site receives visits due to optimizing it this way, this is known as organic traffic.
Other aspects of SEO include how your site is structured. For example, if your landing page has lots of menus that all lead to the same blog without much content, that’s not going to help you rank highly. Logical menus that link to content-rich pages are more likely to help your site appear in search results.
Your website administrator or digital marketing agency should also be able to help you with some of the more technical aspects of SEO. These include the page URLs, meta descriptions (the short descriptions that appear in search engine results), and other details that make search algorithms happy.
Examples of SEO
Appearing prominently on search engine results pages gives you the best chance of gaining leads online. When you search for a product or service, or simply seek information, take a look at the search results. You’ll often see a site displayed prominently at the top that best answers your question.
That’s why it’s critical to ensure your content isn’t just jammed full of keywords. It must add value by answering the questions of the people likely to purchase your products or services. Short paragraphs and bullet points with clear facts help here.
You can also take advantage of local SEO. Searches with local intent include any query that includes a place or area. For example, a searcher might Google, “Best digital agency in Denver.” If your site is optimized to include relevant keywords that help it appear in local searches, it can boost your visibility. That’s because at least 46% of all Google search requests include local intent.
SEO is considered a critical aspect of any marketing strategy and a top way to boost organic traffic. But search engine algorithms are changing all the time — as often as every day. That’s why working with a partner can help you stay ahead of the curve and on the top of the search engine result pages.
Benefits of SEO
Search engines display their results across several pages. However, most consumers will only click on results on the first page. When you utilize SEO techniques, you’re making it more likely that your business will appear in organic search results and hit that all-important page one.
SEO can help you reach more members of your target audience and even expand your reach into new audience segments. Researching your ideal customers or clients is essential to get this right. For example, if you provide products or services to other businesses, your content must be high-quality and add value in some way.
As the image above highlights, B2B decision-makers rarely stop at the first website they come across. SEO must be finely tuned to attract discerning buyers. SEO content can help position you as an authority in your field and help associate your brand with trusted, shareable content.
SEO is also a great way to get your organization noticed by peers, potential partners, and investors. When your site becomes a trusted commodity within your industry, you’re more likely to appear on the radar of parties with influence. Organic search is a powerful tool for creating a foundation for collaborations with other organizations and individuals.
What is PPC?
PPC is short for pay-per-click and is a type of chargeable advertising used across various online platforms.
Search engines display paid content as well as organic search results. These usually appear at the top and bottom of the page and often have “Ad” next to them to show users that these results are sponsored. Businesses are only charged for these adverts once a user clicks the link, making them pay-per-click adverts or PPC.
Both SEO and PPC will help you appear in search results, but PPC (e.g., Google Ads) will guarantee a prominent position.
The primary difference between using SEO for organic search results and PPC is that PPC ads always cost money but can grow your traffic faster. If you’ve struggled with SEO, PPC marketing could help you build your blog’s readership or generate leads.
Examples of PPC
Advertising has been around for thousands of years, but it’s moved on a bit from hieroglyphics etched into steel. Your marketing strategy won’t be complete without some aspect of paid advertising, and many organizations opt for PPC or paid search.
PPC ads primarily appear in search engines which is why this type of advertising is often simply called “paid search.” Google is probably the most well-known provider however other search engines also offer PPC ads.
You can also opt for PPC campaigns on other platforms. Google Ads offers paid advertising on a number of its partner websites. Instead of simply being a type of search engine marketing, these ads show an image and some text, and include a link to your site.
Other PPC ad options include social media platforms. If you’re ever scrolling through Facebook and notice adverts in between your friends and family’s updates, those may be PPC advertisements.
PPC campaigns usually consist of careful keyword search volume research. Your goal, then, is to discover specific keywords that are used often in searches and also connect to your content, products, or services. PPC marketers then bid for those keywords, and the winning bidder gets to appear on the search engine results page.
Setting up a PPC campaign might seem simple but without the right experience and support, can quickly become expensive. Work with a team like NEWMEDIA that understands the process of setting up PPC ads and campaigns for maximized sales opportunities.
Benefits of PPC
Why do so many businesses use PPC ads? For a start, it’s a lot faster to get results with paid PPC ads than it is via a carefully crafted email or blog campaign.
Paid search has several advantages over SEO. You don’t have to gradually climb the search rankings. Searches matching your PPC campaign keywords will ensure you appear high on the search engine results page. Also, paid search providers usually offer services to allow you to monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns. You can quickly see which PPC advertising campaigns are working and which aren’t.
However, there are some downsides, which is why you shouldn’t entirely neglect your SEO strategy. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get good returns off PPC campaigns — and if costs escalate, they could gouge your marketing budget. That’s why you need expert support to leverage the potential profits.
Both SEO and PPC Can Help Your Business Grow
Savvy businesses use both search engine optimization and pay-per-click services to reach as many customers as possible. Combining SEO and PPC means you’re taking advantage of multiple marketing channels. While your business enjoys paid search results with PPC, search engine optimization can drive blog visitors and gradually increase demand generation.
SEO and PPC are two aspects of digital marketing that work well together. That’s why NEWMEDIA offers SEO and PPC services to its business, agency, and franchise clients, to help them leverage the opportunities of both.
When it comes to SEO vs. PPC, embracing each one means you get the best of both worlds. Both SEO and PPC will help your business appear more prominently on search engines and could help you increase your brand visibility.
Top SEO Tactics
Even if you’re already using SEO and PPC together, it helps to understand some of the top SEO tactics organizations use to get results.
On-Page SEO
As you can see from this graphic of which SEO technique marketers think is most effective, on-page SEO is the most popular.
On-page SEO means making changes and additions to your website content that cause it to appear more frequently in search engine queries. Techniques here may include:
- Including popular search keywords and phrases
- Creating authoritative content
- Answering frequently asked questions
- Ensuring content is unique and valuable
- Making content easy to read and/or scan for facts
- Graphics with appropriate alt text
When you create content that adds value to readers, you’re helping optimize your on-page or on-site SEO. However, you also need to include data that search engine bots look for, like keywords, headers, and clearly answered queries.
Off-Page SEO
Not all SEO happens on your website. Off-page SEO refers to tactics that involve using other online portals to drive organic traffic to your site. Examples of this include:
- Backlinking
- Guest posting
- Social media marketing
Backlinking occurs when another website links back to yours. You might have created a useful business resource that someone shared, or done some research that someone cited in an article. These links back to your content show Google and other search engines that your site is trusted. The more links you get, the better the chance you’ll climb the search rankings. Creating a network of links is called a link-building strategy.
Guest posting is another great way to drive organic traffic. You can partner up with other growing businesses and offer them a guest post in exchange for placing content on their site. For example, as a real estate agency, you might let local service providers share their blogs on your site. These may include interior designers, plumbers, or electricians. They get the benefit of reaching your audience of potential homebuyers.
In return, you could ask them to publish your blogs about the local areas you both serve. Your insights into the area may benefit their readers and drive traffic to your site.
Social media marketing is another off-page technique to drive traffic to blogs, articles, or even your site’s landing pages. Sharing links via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (X) and other platforms helps reach more potential customers.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is a vital aspect of SEO because it helps you match your content to relevant keywords people are looking for in Google search. If you can achieve this, you’ll drive organic traffic to your website and other online portals.
Some businesses can find keyword research challenging. Even though there are some online tools out there to help you understand trending keywords, it’s not always obvious which you should use. NEWMEDIA can help demystify keyword research and optimize your online content with ease.
Top Tip: Even your PPC advertising should include relevant keywords to help it stand out from the crowd.
Technical SEO
A top reason businesses partner with SEO agencies is the intricacies of technical SEO. While aspects like URL structure and site speed might seem overly technical, they’re essential to generate organic traffic. Appearing in Bing and Google search results is much more likely when your website works well and has the data search engines look for.
A technical SEO specialist will ensure that:
- Your site loads quickly.
- Your site architecture helps it rank highly.
- Your sitemap is submitted to Google.
- Effective indexing and tagging are in place.
- Meta descriptions and SEO headers are working.
If these terms seem baffling, it’s probably time to onboard SEO specialists like NEWMEDIA to ensure you’re reaching the maximum number of leads possible.
Responsive Website Design
The way your website is designed can massively impact the volume of traffic you receive on a daily basis. Over half of all web visits come from mobile devices like cell phones and tablets.
If your website is unreadable on a smartphone, the chances are your leads will click away and choose one of your competitors. Mobile SEO starts with responsive web design, i.e., websites that respond to all types of devices — not just PCs and Macs. Both SEO and PPC campaigns should take different devices into account. However, ad providers will normally ensure that ads are visible on all devices.
SEO ROI Potential
When comparing SEO and PPC, it helps to know which will bring in the biggest ROI. However, as SEO can be slow to start and grows your brand over time, calculating ROI accurately can be challenging.
Current research shows that 49% of marketers believe that SEO offers the best return on investment. And, some statistics indicate that with the right support, SEO can offer an ROI of up to 2,200%.
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Improve my organic rankingsTop PPC Tactics
Just like with SEO, there are multiple ways to utilize PPC to reach your target audience and other potential customers. Figuring out how to get the most out of your PPC efforts is easier when you follow these tips.
Craft Compelling Ad Copy
Getting your ad on the search result page is only the first step. The advertisement then has to grab the searcher’s attention. Although this tip is for PPC, SEO techniques can help you here. Utilize keywords to make your adverts stand out and appeal to your target audience.
Make Landing Pages Mobile-Friendly
If a searcher clicks your ad but then can’t navigate the website it leads to, that’s a wasted click — and wasted money. Ensure that all your landing pages are responsive and optimized for multiple device types.
Track Your Performance Carefully
With the right management, PPC can become a source of recurring revenue. The initial outlay should be recouped through clicks that consistently lead to sales. With proper management, the cost of clicks should constantly be outweighed by the profits generated via sales and leads.
However, if you don’t track the performance of your PPC campaigns, you could find that you’re actually losing money instead.
This chart shows an example of what can happen if you don’t monitor campaigns. Product A’s adverts have brought in four orders — but the total cost of the campaign was more than the revenue. When ad costs are more than what they bring in, this generates a negative return on investment (ROI). That’s why so many businesses opt for trusted third-party PPC agencies to manage their campaigns and check for performance issues like this.
PPC ROI Potential
One of the great things about PPC is that it’s fairly simple to calculate ROI compared to long SEO campaigns and other digital marketing strategies.
How much money will you get from your PPC campaigns? That depends on the value of the products and services offered plus the expertise and experience of your PPC campaign managers.
Comparing SEO and PPC ROI can be challenging without an expert partner to track and monitor every aspect of website optimization, backlinking, campaigns, and more. NEWMEDIA is a trusted digital marketing agency offering a full range of SEO and PPC services, helping businesses understand their marketing success better.
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Book a free consultationNEWMEDIA: Your PPC and SEO Agency
Here at NEWMEDIA, we understand that while the difference between SEO and PPC is vast, both can help you reach new customers and clients. Crafting effective digital marketing strategies means building effective marketing campaigns across multiple channels. We help you craft SEO content that works and provide ad copy that converts.
Our team is dedicated to increasing search traffic for your business. We use specific keywords and other SEO techniques to help you grow organic results. Plus, we can start ad campaigns for immediate results.
Services We Offer
Whether you’re still mulling over the benefits of SEO vs. PPC or you want to utilize aspects of both, NEWMEDIA can help. Here are just a few of the SEO and PPC offerings available from our full-service digital marketing agency.
Ecommerce SEO
Having an online shop is no longer solely the realm of large retailers. Despite low numbers as compared to the pandemic-inspired ecommerce boom of 2021, sales of online retailers are still growing at a significant rate.
Because competition is so fierce, cutting through the noise is a real challenge. Here at NEWMEDIA, we help your online shop gain traction via effective SEO strategies. When you work with our team, we’ll help you increase sales, attract new customers, and boost your brand reputation and visibility.
We help optimize your images and keyword usage, and can even offer quality content writing services to help place your store ahead of your competitors. Become the go-to for your customers for all things related to your niche. We can help transform your online business into a trusted entity and a brand that’s intrinsically linked with your products.
Digital Marketing SEO
SEO doesn’t just exist on your page, as we’ve seen. We offer a range of digital marketing services, including off-page SEO, social media marketing, and SEO consulting services. NEWMEDIA can entirely overhaul your current digital marketing strategy, helping you spend less while achieving more.
We go deep into the technical side of SEO, creating meta tags and optimizing your site for search engine bots and crawlers. By combining PPC and SEO, we create full SEM (search engine marketing) packages that are entirely bespoke to your organization. Throughout the lifetime of campaigns, we will monitor and track performance, helping you understand your successes better.
We’ll even help you create an entire social media marketing roadmap to let you take advantage of the many channels available at your fingertips. NEWMEDIA is the partner you need for a completely omnichannel marketing approach.
Local SEO
We help businesses build their local profile from the ground up, creating or improving their Google Business Profiles and optimizing content for local search keywords.
As you can see, we use the same techniques ourselves. We know that Google helps businesses rank higher if they have complete Business Profiles, reviews, and citations — and we’ll help you get all those factors complete. Our team also checks to make sure that your contact details are readily available and that your business is listed in other commonly searched databases.
According to Google, you’re more likely to make a sale on the day if the searcher used local intent. Make sure all your online content is optimized to meet these potential customers where they are.
Agency SEO Partnerships
As an UpCity Top 1% Ranked Digital Agency, NEWMEDIA knows how hard agencies work for their clients. If you’re a marketing agency that needs support with any aspect of SEO and PPC, speak to our team. Our SEO campaigns have organically produced over 70,000 top-3 rankings for at least 250 organizations to date. We manage all the moving parts of SEO campaigns and help you provide better services to your clients. NEWMEDIA also provides expert tracking and monitoring of campaign performance so you can showcase results to your clients with ease.
Semrush reports that nearly 94% of businesses outsource at least some of their marketing.
Make sure you’re able to offer a full, end-to-end digital marketing experience for your clients by partnering with NEWMEDIA.
Ecommerce PPC
Heading back to the world of online shopping, you don’t have to rely solely on SEO to gain organic traffic. NEWMEDIA helps online retailers or anyone with an e-shop gain more traffic via paid search. You’ve already seen how crowded the ecommerce market is. Paid advertising is a top technique for getting your brand noticed in a sea of competitors.
Our ecommerce PPC services help get eyes on your page when you need them most. We can help you drive visitors to your product pages or other content during sales, seasonal peaks, or for a new launch.
PPC Digital Marketing
NEWMEDIA helps you set up PPC across multiple channels. We help you appear high on the search engine results page but also on social media and other platforms. Our experts understand all the different PPC providers and how effective they are for particular industries. Talk to our team to discover how you can optimize your advertising budget and appear in the most places online.
We also know how to mitigate click fraud, thus avoiding unnecessary payments for invalid clicks. Both Google Ads and Facebook Ads suffer from this issue, but our PPC professionals know how to guard against it.
PPC Management
NEWMEDIA’s PPC experts provide end-to-end PPC campaign management. For example, we can expertly manage keyword bids so that they don’t become prohibitively expensive.
This chart shows how quickly PPC costs can spiral if not managed properly, particularly in highly competitive industries. Our team will ensure your paid search campaigns have positive ROIs and become a source of revenue generation rather than a drain on marketing budgets.
We also help track attribution so you know exactly what’s driving leads, sales, and overall ROI. You can use this data to hone future marketing campaigns and ensure you’re focusing your budget in the right area. Work with us to create ongoing, effective advertising campaigns that become a driving aspect of your overall marketing strategy.
Responsive Website Design
It doesn’t matter how high up the search engine results your site is if it doesn’t work on someone’s smartphone. Plus, paid search is a waste of money if visitors instantly click away because they can’t read your content. NEWMEDIA will help you create an entirely responsive website, optimized for all types of devices. We can help you with accessibility and ensure you don’t accidentally exclude segments of your target audience.
Why Businesses Trust NEWMEDIA
Why choose NEWMEDIA? Our team has provided success for clients for over 25 years. That’s more than a quarter of a century of top-rated sites with over $3.5 billion worth of revenue generated.
Experience You Can Trust
Those figures speak for themselves, but we’re honored to also have been recognized by other industry leaders. A few of our accolades include:
- SEOblog Top Rated SEO Agency
- DesignRush Top Web Development Company
- SelectedFirms Top E-Commerce Development Company
- United States National Excellence Winner
- Expertise.com Best Digital Marketing Agency
The Ultimate Agency
We scale brands and help repair and boost online reputations, all while driving sales and demand. By combining multiple strategies like SEO and PPC, we can help significantly lower your cost of acquisition and increase conversion rates. We’ll also help you raise your retention rate, discouraging customers and clients from going to the competition.
NEWMEDIA can help your business generate more organic traffic than ever. Plus, we help you take advantage of the paid advertising opportunities available so your site climbs the search rankings.
Always Ready
Our clients include big names like Amtrak, CBS Television, and Pinkard Construction. Because we’ve worked with companies across so many verticals, we’re confident we can find the right marketing solutions for your organization. We create SEO and PPC strategies with your business and industry in mind. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, and we’re always looking for new ways to help your business edge ahead of the competition.
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