Owning and managing a website is in no way different from owning and operating a retail store. It implies updating and maintaining the product daily, paying bills, and investing in finding new ways to bring customers in. Both retail stores and website owners use various advertisement techniques to attract new customers and get them to either go in the store or to click their way through until they land on the page they are promoting. Search Engine Optimisation and Pay-Per-Click are two potent marketing tools webmasters use to generate or increase traffic.
Understanding the Difference Between SEO and PPC
If you want to see your website traffic increase and rank pages higher in search engines, you need to use search engine marketing tools to make your site more visible. SEM is used for websites of all classifications and sizes, products, and services. Tech giants like Apple, online casinos like www.casino.com/slots/, and consumables distributors like the Whole Foods Market will all use SEO and PPC to appear first in a search engine. Both tools can lead to additional traffic for a website, but the main difference between them is that SEO is free while PPC is not.
If your budget allows for paid online advertising, then PPC buys you time and occasionally “privileged” positioning. By investing some money in Pay-Per-Click campaigning, you can get faster results and allow for having a bit more control over the positioning of your page/advertisement in a search engine. It is an excellent way to quickly promote a product, which is showing great potential, and an even better way to get specific keywords to rank better quickly. However, as the name implies, you will need to be prepared to pay for every click that redirects the viewer to your product.
On the other hand, SEO is an alternative for those who have limited funds to invest in advertising or those who do not mind waiting longer until their website and keywords climb up the search engine ladder organically. Unfortunately, climbing up the search engine ladder is not easy, as even the best-optimized websites cannot beat paid advertisements and popular websites. If one were to compare SEO based advertising to real-life retail marketing, then it would be like having a privately-owned burger place right next to a McDonald’s or a Burger King. The privately-owned burger place might have a product that is better than both its competitors, but the heavy advertising and the natural public attraction for what is most popular are not an easy obstacles to overcome.
Using SEO and PPC Together
Even though SEO and PPC are two different approaches used to make a webpage more visible, nothing is stopping you from using them together. Many business and webmasters optimize their web pages with specific keywords for SEO purposes and then back their work by using PPC to push the ranking of that keyword in a search engine. This means that the PPC boost will also drive the organic ranking higher. However, it is worth mentioning that when you stop using PPC, you might see some losses in terms of the organic search engine rankings. To avoid that, you can try continuing PPC advertising by using a more conservative spending approach, reducing the cost per click for your keywords and web pages.
