SEO vs PPC – Separate Strategies or Better Together?

SEO / 07 Dec 2021

Which is better, SEO or PPC? Ah, that old marketing strategy chestnut. Honest answer: it depends. There are numerous factors to consider, including your goals, timeframe, and available budget.

Our advice as a white label SEO copywriting agency is to use both strategically to complement one another. Read on to find out how.

The Basics: What’s What?

Before you rush into any resource-intensive marketing decisions, let’s consider the who’s who and what’s what of search engine visibility.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation (SEO for short) is the practice of optimising web pages to drive traffic organically to your website. Search engines index and rank websites based on their content’s expertise, authority, and trust. The higher quality, the higher the ranking. For a more in-depth explanation of what SEO is and how it works, read our blog ‘What is SEO?’.

SEO is a slow and steady process of climbing the search engine results pages, often likened to a marathon. It’s a low cost (compared to PPC), long term strategy to increase your business visibility.

What is PPC?

Pay per click (commonly referred to as PPC) is targeted advertising that appears above and below organic results on search engine results pages. For every website visitor that clicks on the advert, you pay a fee.

PPC is the total opposite of SEO. It generates results fast, makes you immediately visible, and instantly sends traffic to your website. The flipside of that is that it’s a paid-for privilege. Once your payments stop, so does the traffic.

Which is better for your business and at what point in time depends on several factors, which we’ll consider below.

Making an Informed Decision

As with most things in marketing, SEO and PPC are a means to an end. SEO is a slow burn, while PPC is a quick win. It’s your classic tortoise and hare scenario.

Whether it’s right for you will depend on your circumstances:

•   If you’re launching a product in 2 months with no existing leads to speak of, PPC would be the way to go.
•   If you’re promoting a lead magnet on a landing page (which rarely rank well – there’s not enough content), PPC is the obvious choice.
•   If you’re willing to wait 6 months to see results, SEO is a sensible, investment.
•   If you know your ideal client doesn’t respond well to paid advertising (that’s the level of insight we recommend when creating your ideal client avatar), SEO would be a better use of your energy.

The Best of Both Worlds

Rather than thinking of SEO and PPC as a choice between alternatives – an ultimatum of sorts – instead consider whether you can use them together to maximise your competitive advantage.

SEO is a long game. It takes months to generate meaningful data and results, whereas PPC is an instant-win scenario.

So, use one to complement the other.

Think about it like this. Use SEO to advance your long term goals by finding low competition keywords. Start the work to increase your ranking for those terms. At the same time, use PPC to rank for higher competition keywords you otherwise wouldn’t rank for. Your ads will generate traffic in the short term while your SEO momentum builds. You’ll become a double threat in no time. 

Well, within a few months because – you know – the whole ‘SEO is a marathon, not a sprint’ thing we said earlier on.

Let’s Get Visible

Whether you choose SEO, PPC or a combination of both to achieve your marketing goals, you’ll need a robust strategy in place to get the best results.

As a white label SEO copywriting agency, we can help with that.

Book your no-strings discovery call to find out how we can get you and your clients visible on the search engine results pages.