Which of the two provides more value? If you were to invest in just one, would SEO or PPC generate a stronger ROI?
Our Growing Reliance on Search
Ideally,a strategic combination of SEO and PPC advertising is the best way to go. One implemented with long-term gains in mind, the other capable of providing an immediate yet temporary traffic boost.
Today,research suggests that more than 80% of consumers now find their desired websites and online businesses through search engines. In addition, close to95% of all online experiences begin with a web search.
Figures that clearly illustrate the importance of appearing prominently in the SERP rankings. Or perhaps, bypassing the rankings and appearing right at the top of the page. Handled strategically, both SEO and PPC have the potential to catapult you to the very top of the listings. Nevertheless, these two approaches to search marketing bring their own unique benefits and downsides to the table.
Organic Vs Paid
For example, a recent study found that organic search listings are more than eight times more likely to be clicked than the paid search listings at the top of the page.Over the past few years, consumers have shown growing preference to organic listings, over and above paid advertising. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest that many of the page ads toward the right of the screen in particular are ignored entirely.
This would therefore seem to suggest that SEO rules the roost. However, PPC marketing has been found to perform slightly better in terms of conversionrates. When a web user clicks a PPC ad,they are around 1.5 times more likely to convert than a user who clicks an organic listing. Nevertheless, this doesn’t necessarily compensate for the significant disparity in the number of clicks the respective website attract in the first place.
On the whole, organic search appears to be more than five times more effective than paid search.
Today Vs Tomorrow
Even given the above, it isn’t quite as black-and-white as it may appear. Get it right with an SEO company and you could be looking at incredible performance on an indefinite basis. Nevertheless, it could also take weeks, months or even years for your campaign to reach fruition.
With PPC, every business has the opportunity to reach the very top of the search listings by the end of the day. Targeting high-profile keywords, you can pretty much guarantee an immediate and sizeable influx of traffic with a PPC strategy. Doing so may prove costly, but can nonetheless bring your online business the traffic it needs in no time. If you have a chiropractic clinic, ChiroPraise builds custom Google PPC ad campaigns for your clinic.
By contrast, an on-going SEO strategy can be less costly to fund.
…and the winner is?
As touched upon right at the start, the best approach is to combine PPC and SEO into one all-round search strategy for your business. On paper however, SEO hasthe capacity to deliver greater value and a stronger ROI on your initial spend.Albeit, after a prolonged period of waiting for your campaign to hithigh-gear.
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