Difference between Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

One major difference between Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is that the former one works with money and the latter one is free.  Both of them are a part of search engine marketing and they can be really fruitful for your internet marketing campaign. All companies offering SEO services use them collectively.

Let’s study the difference between the two on the basis of certain factors:

Cost

SEO is free while PPC is paid. A lot of hard work is required to get traffic from different search engines for free. You need a great SEO plan to reach to the top search results. PPC, on the other hand, uses a PPC system like Google Adwords to bring traffic to your website. You only have to pay for the clicks your ad receives, not the views. You can determine the daily budget and calculate what average CPC (Cost Per Click) would be for the keywords you want to target. In short, the cost of SEO is indirect. You don’t have to pay to get better research ranking, but you sure have to pay for the SEO services.

Traffic potential

You might be thinking PPC brings more traffic but it’s actually the other way around.  With SEO, once your website is in the top five positions, you can expect to have a continuous flow of traffic and you don’t even have to pay for it. But that’s true too that it is very difficult to rank your keywords on the first page and the only option you are left with is to bring traffic through PPC.

Conversion

So, which visitor is going to convert, the one that comes from an organic search for the one that comes from a PPC ad? If your ads are optimized and well targeted, then the visitor from a PPC can convert really well. In case of SEO, sometimes, a web page is ranked for multiple keywords. So, when a visitor comes to your website but does not find what he was looking for, he won’t make a purchase, obviously. In that case, PPC brings better conversion.

Ease of use

To be honest, SEO and PPC both are not easy. If you don’t understand them well and you don’t have experience with them, you won’t find them easy. SEO is a long process and it takes a lot of time to rank your keywords. To make the most out of PPC, you need to be an expert otherwise; you can lose hundreds of dollars on paying for something that does not convert at all.

What’s the bottom line?

Your internet marketing campaign can only be successful if you use both PPC and SEO. The results that PPC brings are faster. So, start with PPC first and test which keywords convert better. Then, you can use some best SEO practices to rank those keywords. Although SEO is time taking but once your website is ranked, you will keep on getting traffic. However, in case of PPC, if you stop spending money, you stop getting traffic too.