No matter whether you’ve recently started your business or have been running it for quite a few years already when it comes to increasing sales from your website through online marketing, there is always one question faced by every entrepreneur/owner “Which will work best for getting more sales for business – SEO or Google Ads/PPC?”.
For those who are either new or not too familiar with this online marketing jargon, let me explain a bit about them.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a technique that is meant to tweak the websites as per the Google algorithm so that these SEO-optimized websites will have higher rankings on search engines. These techniques include (but are not limited to) optimization of meta tags, using relevant keywords, content marketing, or linking content to authority websites.
Google Ads (also known as SEM or Pay Per Click), unlike SEO, is a paid advertising medium wherein website owners would pay a search engine like Google to place their website at the top of the search results. Google Ads makes use of a PPC (pay-per-click) type of system which means you will have to pay every time a person clicks on your ad.
In this blog post, I am going to compare SEO vs Google Ads and help you to understand which online marketing method could work best for your business.
Broadly speaking, we can compare Google Ads with SEO based on the following parameters.
#1 Costing
If we talk about cost, Google Ads definitely cost more than SEO because PPC advertisers are required to pay for each click that users make.
Again, depending upon the type of industry and level of competition, the cost per click (also known as CPC) may vary. A business with low or no competition may pay as low as $.50 per click while businesses with cut-throat competition may be required to pay as high as $20 per click. If you are not too sure about handling a PPC campaign, you must consider hiring a Google Ads expert to help you lower the Cost Per Click (CPC).
In the case of SEO, you may not be required to pay as high as Google Ads. If you have enough time, you can run your SEO campaign yourself which won’t cost you even a penny however if you can’t find time, you can always engage a reliable SEO agency or SEO consultant who could help you with the optimization of your website for search engines.
So while choosing the best option between SEO and Google Ads, you must always consider the marginal profit of your products or services.
#2 Timeframe
When it comes to the timeframe, Google Ads always works best. Why? Because you can start getting quality traffic on your website in just a couple of days, sometimes in a couple of hours too. It depends on the level of expertise that you or your Google Ads consultant possess.
For many businesses, it may be crucial to get immediate traffic to their websites in certain cases like events, promotions, limited-time offers, etc. Needless to mention, Google Ads can help them to get quality traffic on their websites, almost instantly.
In the case of SEO, it takes weeks, and sometimes even months, to get ranked on search engine listings. It’s a long and steady process. If you are looking for a long-term, easy, and free/budget solution to market your website, SEO can be considered the best option.
#3 Control
When you run your SEO campaigns and aim to get traffic through organic search, you don’t have control over the exact keywords on which you need your website to rank. For e.g. if I try to optimize my website for the keywords like ‘Google Ads Expert in Singapore’, my website may start showing up for the keywords like ‘Google Ads Specialist’, ‘PPC Ads Specialist‘, or ‘PPC Ads Expert’ too. It simply means you don’t have 100% control over the keywords through which your website will get traffic.
In the case of Google Ads, you can define exact match keywords and ensure that users who use those exact search queries will see your advertisement and only those users will come to your website. So, you have 100% control over the keywords for which you want to show up on your website and get traffic.
Final Words:
Now that you know the difference between SEO & Google Ads, you can easily determine which one is best for your business. Not all fingers are the same, similarly, not all businesses have the same requirements. Depending upon the budget, urgency, and marginal profit on products/services, you can easily choose the best online marketing platform for your business.
