A huge share of global business leaders do not expect a full economic recovery until 2022. This was stated in a report by Global Business Compass last year, and the situation still looks worrisome. If you thought 2020 was a tumultuous year, 2021 hasn’t come as a relief either. While some economies like China have bounced back, countries like Brazil and India are still feeling the wrath of COVID-19 and a recovery seems a distant possibility. 

Small businesses and startups are the ones who are most vulnerable to any change in the dynamics of the market. And the deadly virus has wreaked havoc on such businesses across the world. Companies doing business online come up with different marketing tactics to help their business pull through, but the marketplace is still ripe with uncertainty. And this is why many businesses still don’t know what to do and how to proceed. 

Optimizing the website to expand your influence, reach out to more potential customers, and rank higher on Google searches can make this possible. SEO and PPC helps your website rank high on Google SERPs. A high ranking on Google can make a huge difference in the success of any website. 

Many people around the world ask the same question very often that is SEO worth it? Answer is absolutely yes as SEO is purely organic in nature, while PPC is paid marketing and both are starkly different in their approach. The end result may be the same, but right from the start till the end, tactics and strategies related to SEO and PPC are very different, even if they both are some of the most common growth hacking services. In the current scenario, businesses look for a way to make their business tick upwards.  Let’s analyze both SEO and PPC and what can work for you in 2021 and bring your business back to normal.

Benefits of SEO

Targeted Keywords offer Better Results

SEO offers better awareness for the targeted keywords from any website. For the branding aspect too, SEO leads the way in offering positive branding benefits. The keywords associated with the brand can lead visitors to different topics on their blog. Credibility and trust are other aspects that one can associate with SEO. And finally, SEO drives more website traffic as there are more opportunities for businesses to drive awareness for their product or service. 

Cost per Click

The cost per click from organic search is virtually free as the time and effort you have invested in getting the backlinks and increasing visibility will eventually pay off. The eventual cost of SEO won’t be cheap, but it will be a fraction of what you will have to pay as compared to the PPC.

Click-Through Rate: SEO Leads the Way

Improved click-through rate is another factor why SEO works big time for businesses. A high percentage of users click on the organic results as most of us assume that the top 3 to 5 websites in the search results are the best in their category. And it is also responsible for overall more clicks than PPC because, in paid marketing, you have to pay for every click, while SEO is organic and virtually free. 

The Big Advantage 

The advantage with SEO is that it is cost-effective, and the organic search, once achieved, will bear fruits for the website for some time to come and will be visible in your seo reports template. When you establish your position on the top of Google searches, there is no way that your competitors can buy that position even with spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on PPC. 

This was a general overview of SEO, but don’t make a quick judgment because I haven’t discussed PPC yet. Go through the following points to know why PPC is still a force to reckon with, and millions of users worldwide still prefer PPC over SEO. But for achieving all these benefits you must be a SEO expert so that you have complete command over it that how google will rank your site organically.

Advantages of PPC

Targeted Visibility

It is evident from its name that you have to pay per click from the people searching for the keywords related to your product. There are certain scenarios in which organic search will take several months to materialize. If you are looking for quick results, then PPC is the only way forward. The positioning of the PPC ads is such that users need to go past the paid search ads even if they want to scroll down. That’s why everyone will have a look at paid results, and the probability is high, then most of them will click on those PPC ads.

Improved Visual Ads

In essence, PPC ads control more space on the search page than the organic results. There are many ways to get the attention of the person looking for a particular product. The ads are now improved so that they don’t look like an ad and can comprise locations, images, pricing, and bullet points so that they will look like someone has accumulated all the information for you.

The visual ads also offer images of various sizes and different colors of the same product so that people searching for it get interested in it. Visual ads can greatly improve the click-through rate by offering a feature not available in organic search. The brand visibility is greater than what you can get with SEO. Even if the person does not opt to buy your product, he will remember your usual marketing through PPC ads and will increase the chance for your product in the future.

Budget

One general misconception is that PPC ads are very expensive, and small businesses and startups can’t afford them. But this is not the reality as PPC offers tight control of the budget you have allocated right from the start. PPC provides a targeted way of getting to your goal rather than the organic way. The speed of the PPC ads can get you to your goal within a few days rather than a few weeks or even several months in the case of SEO. However, it’s worth mentioning that if you’re looking for some results straight away, then what you need is a trustworthy agency. For sure, there’re plenty of aggregators like Sortlist, Capterra, and GetCredo that can give you a list of the best SEO and PPC providers based on user reviews. That said, you also need to brainstorm the right set of questions to help validate potential agencies.

More Marketing Insights

PPC is more advanced when it comes to tracking the keywords, what kind of words are converted, and at what percentage and cost. This gives you a clear idea as to which keyword you have to concentrate more on and the keywords that are getting you the results to make a new move about them. The use of Google Analytics can help you in getting to know whether you are close to your goal, reaching your target audience for getting away from it.

The stability you can get with PPC is not available in organic results as the change in Google search policy and indexing of the keywords can wreak havoc on the ranking of the websites. If you can carefully craft your Strategies for PPC, the result will surprise you as the ROI can increase considerably. The overall cost can be lowered through constantly searching using the data from Google Analytics. Using PPC for a small geographical area can bear fruit for you without picking up a hole in your pocket. 

Final Word

For the best results, deeply analyze your strategy and goals, and only then will you have a good idea as to whether SEO or PPC will work wonders for your business. The consensus amongst top marketing professionals and companies is that, in the long run, organic search delivers more volume and at better cost/lead than paid search. But I have discussed in several points above, PPC can be productive in certain cases. And if you have a big budget and not enough time to market your product, PPC can work out for you much better than SEO. 

What is your experience of applying SEO or PPC to market your product or service? Please share it with my readers, as adding your bit to this blog will make it interesting. If you have any questions or want to give your feedback, please use the comments section below.