Google Ads vs SEO: Which is better for your business?

As a business owner, before you can make the right choice between Google Ads vs SEO, it is quite paramount to know and understand what each entails. Basically, both are part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and both can produce results.

Both components, PPC and SEO, are quite vital when cooking up a digital marketing strategy for your business. In all, the end result remains the same with both Google Ads and SEO, increasing your business’ bottomline; traffic, leads, sales, and profit. But the question remains, which is better for your business?

In this article, you would learn all about these two search engine marketing strategies, PPC vs SEO. In the end, you should be able to make the right choice for your business.

So, let’s dive right in.

What is PPC?

Pay-per-click, commonly known as PPC, is a model of online advertising and marketing in which you only pay when visitors click on the ad. When a user searches for a specific keyword on Google, your ad is shown in the sponsored results section. And when the user clicks on the ad, you’ll get charged the designated amount.

This marketing method is most times preferred by businesses because there would be no need for payment when no action has been carried out by users on the ad. Again, this is a strong reason why many businesses prefer Google Ads to social media marketing platforms that do not use PPC.

Running an ad campaign on Google isn’t automatically going to produce the results you want. There are several factors that come into play to determine how successful your ad would run. So, it’s not just about creating a budget to run a PPC campaign for your business, it’s also about mastering how you can make the ads work best for your business.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO, can be defined as the act of adding content on one’s website which makes it more visible. This also increases its relevance when users search for related items on search engines.

How would your site be chosen out of more than 21 million pages that the user’s preferred search engine has indexed on the keyword the user has searched for? It’s by making your site SEO friendly. The aim here is to make search engines put up your websites as a top result when relevant searches are made on Google.

Implementing an appropriate SEO strategy could also increase your search engine monetization. As a business owner with a website online, It is quite necessary for you to understand what SEO is in order to drive your rankings higher. Increasing your site visibility whether on-page or off-page remains the long-term goal of SEO, and it’s a proven and effective strategy to make your business page an authority in your field.

While making use of SEO, a resourceful business owner has to monitor the upcoming trends such as optimizing voice search, and also having content that has been created with the user in mind, better put as buyer-centric. Other trends include offering an easy-to-use and pleasuring user experience which helps to reduce bounce rate, and a host of other strategies.

PPC vs SEO: Differences between Google Ads and SEO

Depending on your business size and your digital marketing budget, the answer to the debate of SEO vs PPC varies from business to business. But like we’ve highlighted in the introduction, both strategies work, it all boils down to what you want to achieve for your business at the moment.

What differentiates the two marketing strategies? We have highlighted some measures to be considered below:

1. Target Audience

While using the PPC advertising model, the business owner could easily manage the preferred type of people on the website and web pages. You can easily control the sort and particular range of users to be led to the website and web pages. Here, you can narrow the reach of your ads to a particular set of people, using different types of data, such as geography, education, etc.

However, using SEO avails one to a wide range of audiences and free traffic. Not one specific group of people are usually targeted to generate traffic for the SEO, which means that all and sundry would be exposed to one’s website and web pages once it has been fully optimized.

2. Cost Attached

The cost to be incurred using these marketing strategies usually differ in the long run. This would also depend on the size of the business or the product the marketing strategy is being used for.

SEO is basically free in the direct sense. You don’t have to pay Google to have your site ranking on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). But in the implied sense, you might have to incur business costs in building your website, for curating SEO-friendly content, and to manage your web pages in general. But all of these are also needed for a successful PPC campaign.

3. Conversion Time

The time that would be accumulated before conversion is also another measure considered between google ads vs SEO. For one to generate results from SEO, it could take a long while.

It could take weeks, months or even years for one to be able to convert enough users through SEO. Even after optimizing the websites and webpages to increase ranking by the search engine algorithms, you have to compete against other businesses. And it takes a while for you to build enough materials on your website before you can reach the status of an authority site.

With PPC, however, you only need to pay for the ads. Once they have been set up, you can calculate how many clicks per each ad run and how much conversion has been made from those clicks. Maybe we should also mention that once you stop paying for the ads, there is no conversion that can be made. So, it’s not only pay per click, it’s also pay for results.

4. How They Work

Google ads is Google’s PPC solution that allows businesses to place bids on when their ads would be shown on both Google search platform and relevant websites in the Google Display Network, when people explore or look out for some particular keywords which might be particularly or related to what you offer. SEO simply implies adding relevant content on one’s website to ensure it shows up more often on Google SERPs.

Is Google Ads or SEO better for your business?

Now that we can properly compare and contrast the google ads and SEO, how then do business owners know if google ads or SEO would be better for the business? How do we make the right choice between the two components? Would it be better to combine both google ads and SEO to drive conversion?

You cannot fully ascertain whether google ads or SEO is the best online marketing. Both models duly drive traffic to the websites but that doesn’t still imply that usage of one or both of these search engine marketing models would be better. It would only be more efficient to determine which could generate more profit for your business depending on the situations.

Here are some tips to be considered below to make one choose the right measure and properly strategise for one’s business growth:

• Digital Marketing Budget

As a business owner who wants to succeed in online marketing, you have to devote resources to making your business thrive online. While many businesses might be used to traditional marketing or at least paying for influencer marketing, what you also need to consider is creating a solid digital marketing budget that covers your search engine marketing needs.

From your marketing budget, you have to heimark appropriate amounts to cover your Google Ads campaign and to also manage your SEO strategies. For example, Dropbox’s usage of Google Ads in 2009 which resulted in them spending higher than their product cost. Their product was only $99 and yet, they were spending a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) between $233 to $388.

• Type of product or content being promoted

Are you selling a product or service which has been freshly introduced into the market, mostly one that is an innovative disruption such as AirBnb, Uber, etc? If so, it would be wiser and more appropriate to make use of PPC.

This is due to the fact that driving organic traffic would be possible when you increase focus on keywords that people are already searching for. It is highly possible that most people have not heard about your product or content, a disruptive innovation, earlier on, so they wouldn’t necessarily be searching for it and it might not come up as top ranked by the search algorithms.

Using PPC would help to build digital awareness and recognition for one’s product or service.

• Time for measuring results

If you require generation of fast results, you would need to make use of PPC, since the traffic is being driven directly to one’s business. This also comes into cognizance when you are promoting one-time offers on the websites to users, or when a product is being newly launched and you want to ensure rapid conversion after its launch.

However, if you are looking to sell the website some time in the future, you might not necessarily need to make use of PPC. This is due to the fact that it would just keep on accumulating cost per every conversion. You would only need to make sure that you are ranked in the top searches for some specific keywords and you wouldn’t need to constantly check or manage the website.

Your rankings increase over time, provided you are still in the top searches and it could later stay put. You could then make the right choice between SEO and PPC, depending on the period to be attached for each marketing strategy, whether in the long run or short run.

Wrap up

We hope you have been able to fully understand through this post what Google Ads and SEO mean for your business. And with recurrent terms such as PPC, SERP, and Ad Campaigns; all of these work together to better your business’ search engine marketing tactics.

So, depending on your type of business, you can now comfortably know which strategy to prioritize. And like we’ve mentioned, you don’t have to forgo one for the other. Both are beneficial for businesses, and both have their best use. Google Ads for fast and targeted results, while SEO is for extended results.

Need help with creating a working search engine marketing strategy for your business?

At Klutch Growth, we specialise in helping businesses convert site visitors into leads. Contact us today at 514-944-9961 or info@klutchgrowthagency.com to spiral a journey of immense growth for your business.

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