Before we touch on any of the reasons as to why PPC Advertising is better for almost any kind of online marketing campaign than SEO, let us just say that SEO is not a complete waste of time. Our intention is not to bad mouth SEO.
SEO can be very effective, particularly when used in conjunction with PPC Advertising Campaigns, and this is not something that we are trying to refute entirely.
However, in our experience, PPC Advertising is better than SEO if you are looking for online marketing results and you want them fast. If speed and profit are the top two aims of your online marketing strategy, PPC is always going to be the best form of online advertising. SEO is always going to be running up behind.
Why?
Because SEO takes longer, you have less control over your audience, less control over who you compete with and less control over where your audience navigates to when they go to your site. With SEO you have to cover everything! You have to account for all possible events and this is, quite simply, a huge amount of work.
PPC Advertising is much more focused, much easier to handle and much quicker at delivering results and we will take this opportunity to explain exactly why this is the case.
Table of Contents
Why is PPC better than SEO?
In essence, the relationship between action and result is much clearer and better defined in PPC than it is in SEO.
With SEO, the objective or outcomes might be to do with branding, making connections, building authority and trust, etc. With PPC, the objective is always to sell / to generate more conversions and if the outcome doesn’t meet the objective, we change the PPC Campaign approach so that it does.
This is why PPC is better, in essence, than SEO for almost any kind of online marketing strategy or campaign.
Further details and insight
However, the reasons why PPC is better than SEO go much deeper than the basic (although important) relationship between action and result. For example, consider the following elements of the online marketing campaign and understand how each element of PPC Advertising individually works better than SEO to promote almost any kind of business online…
1. The PPC Manager
The PPC Manager, as opposed to the SEO specialist, is employed to increase sales / conversions. He or she is employed to artistically manipulate the online audience into following the conversion path to the very end. The SEO specialist is employed to simply make sure that the website is indexed and easily found. The objective of the SEO specialist is not to sell (primarily), but to raise awareness.
2. Keyword Selection
In a PPC Campaign, keywords are chosen to attract just a specific selection of people online to your site. The focus of the marketing is very specific. Much more specific than the focus which can be achieved through SEO. Keyword selection in PPC Campaigns helps to EXCLUDE certain types of people online because we know that they are not going to be interested in converting.
3. Advertisement Text
When we create advertisement text for our target audience, it is pure and simple manipulation. We want them to click on our advertisement in order to convert. We use call-to-action words like “Buy,” “Order,” “Claim,” etc.
4. Bidding Management
When we decide how much money to place on certain keywords, it is a business decision, pure and simple. We decide how much we can afford to spend on specific kinds of potential customers and if our ROI doesn’t look pretty at the end of the month, we change our bidding strategies, even if lots of traffic came to the site and people showed interest.
In PPC, they must buy, they must convert, otherwise we are not interested and we change our approach. We use our bidding strategies to control and regulate website traffic flow to ensure that we make money.
5. Landing Page Optimization
We also spend lots of time optimizing our landing pages to ensure that converting is made easy. In fact, not only do we make it easy to convert, but we ensure that there are no other distractions on the landing page that might grab the attention of our potential buyer and stop them from converting.
In SEO, it is very difficult to control which pages our potential buyer lands on, how they get there and what kind of information they are expecting to find. This is why PPC Advertising also does better at online sales than SEO does. PPC is built for online sales, SEO is built for making connections.
6. A Level Playing Field
In SEO, if your site is mature and it has lots of links and has a history of providing excellent content for online users, it gets lots of weighting from search engines like Google. If you are new and trying to start out amongst the big fish, competing on an SEO level is very, very difficult. Sometimes it can seem impossible.
This is not the case, ever, with PPC. PPC Advertising puts the small fish and the big whales on the same playing field instantly. Your Paid Search Advertisements after only a few hours can start to show up on the same page as the really well-known and established companies and you don’t have to pay out lots more to get these opportunities either.
PPC works on any kind of budget.
