When you are starting your digital marketing campaign you will quickly become aware of the terms pay-per-click and search engine optimisation. Both come with their own set of merits and disadvantages and you will have to compare these to what you want to achieve through your campaign.
Ultimately digital marketing campaigns come down to your budget and what you plan to achieve for developing this campaign. Below are the key differences that you need to know between PPC and SEO Australia before you start your digital marketing campaign.
What each method actually does
For a lot of new small business owners they may be completely unaware of what SEO and PPC actually are. To summarise thousands of articles from so called “experts”, SEO is the method of increasing your Google ranking through the optimisation of your website. This is a long process that essentially boosts the worth of your website as your campaign continues to develop.
PPC on the other hand is a short term investment that is essentially adverts for your website. They appear on the top and bottom of the Google and other search engine results page. The payment of your adverts depends on the competitiveness of the search terms you choose and how many people click on them.
As previously mentioned, what you want to do with your campaign and the budget you have will essentially determine what method you choose to use.
Time for results
A big factor that you need to consider with your digital marketing campaign is how quickly you want results to come through. Additionally the time that it takes for your results to come through may affect the quality of your leads and will determine what your long term goals are.
Search engine optimisation is not a short term fix for your business but rather a long term investment. SEO doesn’t have an exact time frame for when results are meant to come in but the general consensus is that you will start to see improvements after 3 months. If you are promoting an event within the next couple of weeks, SEO is not the most effective measure that you can utilise.
PPC methods are instant and can go live to the top of the results page immediately. The downside to this is that while it may be a short term fix, it can avoid underlying issues for your business and can be quite expensive depending on what search terms you are using.
Linking to your website
Both methods essentially bring searchers to specific pages of your website. SEO is very effective for bringing visitors to your home page as it can cover multiple search terms relevant to your business and industry. PPC requires a more specific page to visit as the ads only show for specific terms.
But in saying that you can also get your specific landing pages appear through SEO. This is effective if your business operates in multiple locations as you can optimise it to appear for suburb searches. An example would be a plumbing service in Sydney that has a wide area that they can service. Search terms such as Plumber Sydney, Plumber North Sydney etc. could all be utilised.
