PPC Can Address Shortcomings In SEO

Some people wonder if they should start a PPC (pay-per-click, also known as paid search) campaign instead of investing in SEO. It’s a long-running debate, but a truth about that is PPC can actually address shortcomings in SEO campaigns.

The opposite is also true, in that SEO is able to compensate for shortcomings in paid search advertising.

It’s not so much that one is better than the other. Both are tools, and like any type of tool there are best uses for those tools. In fact, many digital marketing specialists hold that it’s a best practice to use both in tandem. Here are some reasons why.

Paid Search Advertising Starts Strong

An SEO campaign can take months to start showing results; a paid search advertising campaign can start showing them almost overnight. If you need results fast, then paid search is the way to go.

All you have to do is fire up Adwords or Bing Advertising, make an ad or two and wait for them to be approved. Then they start running. Granted, they also start costing you money, but you’re paying to get your business in front of people that are searching for what you’re selling.

So long as your ads are prepared by a skilled paid advertising agency, you’re likely going to start getting something to show for it in a matter of days. On the other hand, SEO takes weeks before increases in rankings and traffic starts to manifest.

PPC Campaigns Can Reach Places SEO Can’t

Another benefit of paid search is that PPC campaigns are able to reach places that search engine optimization cannot. You can place advertisements on YouTube. In mobile applications that are ad supported. On websites around the internet that support display network campaigns.

You can also reach variations of keywords that an SEO cannot anticipate. Granted, Google’s algorithms have gotten better and better in this regard; misspellings and conflations with unrelated brands that would have missed your site completely five years ago will find it today.

Paid search campaigns will actually display ads for almost any variation of your brand and your keywords that a person types in. Some of them would otherwise be missed by an SEO campaign. By broadening the number of searches that an ad for your site appears on, your website and business will be displayed to more people.

But SEO Will Get You More Traffic

However, there is a catch to everything, and the catch here is that SEO services will get you more traffic, qualified leads and ultimately more sales in most cases. This is why it’s actually good to have both. Studies have consistently shown that while plenty of people by volume will click on an ad, vastly more people by proportion will click on an organic search result.

Put it this way.

Imagine the dominant keyword for your site’s products or services – let’s say you sell cat doors – has a large monthly search volume. Let’s say just for the sake of illustration that 10,000 people per month search for “cat doors.”

Studies have consistently shown that drastically more people will click on an organic search result than even the top-most paid search ad, anywhere from 5 to 10 times more often. Numbers vary by case study, but the trend has been confirmed over and over again. Conversion rates for paid search ads are often higher, but let’s illustrate why that may not necessarily be such a point in PPC’s favor.

Let’s assume for the moment that the top search ad consistently gets 5 percent of total clicks on those 10,000 monthly searches, but 30 percent of all clicks goes to the top organic search result. Let’s also assume a conversion rate of 10 percent for paid search and 5 percent for organic search.

That’s 500 clicks for the ad, and 50 conversions per month, compared to 3,000 clicks and 150 conversions for ranking in the top position.

Oh, and a 10 percent conversion rate for PPC? That’s pretty much unicorn territory. In the real world, 3 percent is more like it for ecommerce sites.

Which would you rather have? An immediate small share of sales? Or eventually getting a third of all traffic for a very high value keyword?

The thing is that you don’t have to actually choose; you can get both if you hire an SEO agency that can offer you both SEO services AND paid search services. This is why a lot of smart businesses will actually opt for both.