SEO vs. PPC: What's Better For Your Business?

Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to promote your business and to get more traffic for your site without spending any money. However, pay-per-click advertising can also get you results - sometimes faster. Which one is right for your business?

There are a number of things to consider when you are trying to determine whether you should focus your efforts on SEO or PPC - or whether you should switch from one to the other when faced with a particular set of circumstances. Here are a few things to ask yourself when trying to decide on SEO or PPC for your business:


What's Your Budget?

Pay-per-click advertising can get very expensive. Even if you're fortunate enough to have keywords that don't have a high cost-per-click (CPC), there is still a relatively low average conversion rate for most ads, and so you will need to pay for a lot of clicks before you start seeing sales and e-mail opt-ins. Determine how much you have to spend, and if it's not enough to make it worth it, focus on building your SEO while you save for an appropriate budget for a successful ad campaign.


How Fast Do You Want to Get Results?

Everyone wants their business to be an overnight success, yet that's not going to be possible for most people. Think in more realistic terms and decide how quickly you want to - or need to - get results. SEO is a long-term play, but once you start making gains with it, you will attain a more stable position for your web presence. PPC will achieve faster results, which is useful if you are a small startup, you are introducing a new product or service, or you are trying to turnaround poor quarterly results.

While PPC can get you quicker results, it's not guaranteed. You'll get more prominent exposure for your site, but you may not get the click-through that you need. You have to have a solid campaign behind your budget.


How Much Time Do You Have for Study?

While anyone can learn SEO, not everyone has the time to do it. Casual reading of SEO blogs can help you to understand basic concepts like the need for quality links or how to use keywords appropriately. But how do you get a quality link? How do you know what keywords to target?

You have to devote the time to studying SEO to learn successful strategies and then to implement them. This is especially important since search algorithms are always changing, and you may need to change your strategies quickly to see results. If you don't have the time to devote to learning and staying abreast of successful SEO, it may be worth investing in PPC instead - or hiring someone else to do your SEO for you.


What's Your Competition?

Highly competitive fields may result in two things: The cost-per-click (CPC) of the keywords you want to target for a PPC campaign will be too much for your budget, or if you are trying to use SEO instead, your page will become buried in search results for those keywords. There are a couple of things you can do. Take the slow and steady approach with SEO, or increase your budget for PPC. You can also target more niche keywords that have lower competition to rank your site faster or to manage a PPC campaign that fits your lower budget.

Ultimately, there is no "right" choice when it comes to SEO or PPC. What's right for your business will depend on your budget, your niche, and the results you are trying to achieve. Consider the answers to these questions when trying to make the right choice for your business.

Have you been more successful with SEO or PPC with your business? Share your thoughts in the comments!


About The Author: Chloe Trogden is a seasoned financial aid writer. Her leisure activities include camping, swimming and volunteer work.

Did you find this article helpful? Please let Chloe and myself know by leaving us your valued comments in the comments section below.

Would you like to guest post on the blog? Please use the Contact tab above to get in touch if you write business-related articles or articles on the topics of Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Social Media Marketing/Optimisation (SMO), Blogging, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Related articles:
Common Google AdWords Mistakes And How To Avoid Them
How To Set A Budget For Your Business PPC Campaign

For a list of helpful articles on SEO and PPC, use the following links:
http://www.derekjones.co/search/label/SEO
http://www.derekjones.co/search/label/SEO%20Tips
http://www.derekjones.co/search/label/PPC


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How To Set A Budget For Your Business PPC Campaign

There is much more to establishing an effective pay-per-click (PPC) campaign than choosing target keywords. To get the most out of your PPC campaign, you must define a budget that makes sense and then use those available resources in the most productive way.


1. Define Goals

The most important step that the business can take is knowing precisely what its expectations are. Ideally, the business should be able to quantify the expectations in terms of actual sales or a similar metric. If the keyword is "business consulting", then determine how many additional consultations the business plans to achieve by running this PPC campaign. Too many businesses approach this endeavor in an abstract fashion, but in doing so, there's a tendency to waste resources and be unable to refine future efforts.


2. Employ a Test Campaign

The challenge of creating a proper budget for a PPC campaign is that there is a chicken-and-egg scenario: The business requires information that it doesn't have yet. There are Web-based tools available that will help guesstimate these values based on various parameters. Rather than use those guestimates, however, run a small test campaign based on them. Consider the test campaign a cost of doing business, and the information from it can seed a proper budget.


3. Estimate the Conversion Rate

The next step is to assess the conversion rate of the keywords and key phrases that the business intends to use for the PPC campaign. The conversion rate indicates the number of click-throughs required, on average, to convert a sale. For instance, if the conversion rate for search engine referrals on the primary keyword is four percent, then 25 clicks are necessary to convert a single success.


4. Determine the Maximum Cost per Click

Once the business knows the conversion rate, then it can determine the maximum cost per click. How much is the business willing to pay for each success? Consider a scenario where the sales department has determined that it can afford to pay $10 per conversion. The marketing team, however, is paying on a per-click basic. Since it knows that it takes 25 clicks, on average, to convert a sale, then it cannot pay more than 40 cents per click.


5. Assess Keyword Profitability

Based on the information the business now has, it can determine the profitability of each keyword and key phrase that it intends to use. At this point, it may determine that some keys are not profitable enough, while others receive greater emphasis. There may be other factors in play here than just the bottom line, such as reaching different niches and channels.


6. Set the Budget

The business now has all the information it needs to set the budget. Imagine that the ad provider has offered a rate of 38 cents, which is below the target rate. The sales manager indicates that he wants to achieve 1,000 additional sales through this campaign. Therefore, the marketing department requires 25,000 clicks, which will require $9,500.

If the campaign will use multiple keys, then it will be necessary to itemize the budget based on the desired emphasis. If the allowed budget is less than the necessary budget, then the marketing team can use the difference and the above information as a guide for where to make the cuts.


This has been a guest post from Naked Business Consulting, who have been putting every cent of their PPC budget to good use!

Did you find this article helpful? Please let me know by leaving me your valued comments.

Related articles:
How Google Plus Listing Can Affect Paid Search
Marketer Charlo Barbosa Addresses Link Between PPC, Content Marketing


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How Google Plus Listing Can Affect Paid Search

Google+ is a new social network that has now opened its arms for business marketing. It has the capability of giving good competition to Facebook which is considered the best social network. Many aspects of Facebook and Google+ are very similar.

There is a +1 button for Google+ which is same as the like button on Facebook; this +1 button allows you to share different types of content and also improve the quality of your own search results. They are listed at the right side of each title; so when a user logs in, he/she will be able to click on the button and show their approval for the listing.

Apart from the organic listing, Google has also added its +1 feature for sponsored listing. This +1 feature of Google has made a great impact on the paid search in the following ways:

• All the sponsored ads that are shown on Google+ have a +1 button adjacent to the ad.
  
  
• This button is compulsory and there is no way to remove the button from the ad.
  
  
• Any click on the +1 button will not be counted for the pay to the ad sponsor.
  
  
• But the best part here is that the +1 button has no effect on the quality score of the ad.
  
  
• The viewers of your ad are able to see the +1 stats for your ad.

Apart from the above mentioned points, using the Google+ for paid search marketing is beneficial in the following ways:

• Greater targeting: Google search results are the most widely used results. Therefore, marketing your business here would ultimately help you in reaching your target audience.
  
  
• Speed: Since you use paid search for your business marketing, your ad is being displayed just within few hours on the Google's search result. Therefore, you need not wait for a longer duration for your ad to be live.
  
  
• Control: It is very easy to achieve direct visitors to the relevant page on your site and with the management of Google+ you can have proper control of your budget.
  
  
• Predictability: By using this, you can get a good traffic to your site along with predictable ranking and costs associated. Therefore, the ranking and costs would be more stable and predictable when compared to SEO.
  
  
• Minimise wastage: With right matches according to Google Adwords and by using phrase match combining with negative keywords, you can make sure that your ad will be displayed only for the relevant products only.
  
  
• Greater conversion rates: Usually the conversion rates of PPC are higher than SEO and they are even much higher for display ads.
  
  
• Effect of Branding: Tests have proven that when there is branding affect associated with PPC, it will give positive results even if users don't click on the ad. This will have an impact on the brand awareness during launch or campaigns.

Using the above resources you can easily understand how Google+ is integrated into a search, so you can start managing your online marketing strategy easily for the search plus.


Article written by Kate Ford, a Tech writer from the UK. Catch her @thetechlegend on Twitter.

Do you like this article? Please let me know by leaving your valued comments below.


If you found this or any of my other posts helpful, don't forget to +1 or share the posts to your favourite networks using the toolbar below or by using the "+1" and "Share" buttons located at the bottom of each post.

As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on NetworkedBlogs, via Email (maximum of one email per day), on Facebook and Google+ or by subscribing to our blog feed at:
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Until my next post on Friday, enjoy the rest of the week!