PPC or SEO, Which Should I Get?

PPC puts your client's site or page on the search results at a cost and is useful for additional promotions. SEO involves optimizing your client's site and naturally earning the rankings; it requires more time and effort but provides lasting results. Find out which is best for your client's site below.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising

Also known as Google Ads, PPC is exactly what its name implies. It is paid advertising in which the site owner is charged for each instance of a "click" on the ad. Ads will appear in the advertisement section of the search results, which is usually at the top of the list. The amount paid per click depends on several factors - competition, keywords, etc. You can set budget limits for ads so you can keep track of spending.

PPC is useful for getting a page or site to appear in search results as soon as possible. This makes it a suitable complement to an aggressive marketing strategy. However, as these are paid ads, once you run out of budget or otherwise stop paying the fee, the position in the search results also disappear. Paid ads also target specific landing pages, so a site owner will have to pay more if they want to target additional pages.

Search Engine Optimization 

SEO, on the other hand, is the process of getting a site to rank naturally through a combination of on-page and off-page work. Your client's site will be optimized to address issues in accessibility and content, to name a few. Links will be built via articles and other media to direct users to the pages you choose to target, which will help bolster the site's authority. SEO requires more time to produce results, especially if the keywords chosen are very competitive. Success also requires the possible implementation of many changes to the site in order to fix problems that hamper optimization.

Though SEO requires considerably more time to produce results than PPC, once the site's authority is established, it will appear in the search results at no additional cost. It is also more practical to use SEO when trying to rank an entire site (and not just a page).