SEO or Google Ads Marketing – Which is better for your business?

There are a few important distinctions between SEO (search engine optimisation) and PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to be aware of.

Let’s elaborate.

SEO: Numerous improvements to your website that will increase your website’s ranking on Google SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page).

The more Google essentially “likes” your site, the higher your website will rank. You’re not able to pay for a better ranking, as it’s essentially free to improve your organic ranking. This is done through technical and content-related factors.

PPC: A Google Ads campaign is a paid form of marketing where you “pay per click” to enhance traffic to your site. Running a Google Ads campaign does NOT help your SEO ranking, despite what you may have heard. PPC advertising assists your website to connect with a wider, targeted audience in a variety of ways.

What Does Each Marketing Tool Offer?

SEO and PPC are not the same things. They each offer different benefits for your business.

SEO Marketing

The practice of improving your sites visibility amongst search engines via a number of strategies. Methods such as the below would need to be implemented to your site to improve your rankings:

• Ensuring that the copy (text) on your website is relevant and unique.
• Ensuring that the copy is readable by search engines – meaning that the text is not designed with the image, but is rather added on the backend as text over the image.
• Include keywords that a user might search for online to find your product or service. This doesn’t mean that you should clutter your website with too many search terms, as this will have the opposite effect. Simply ensure that they feauture in your content though.
• Get other credible websites to link back to yours, also known as backlinking. These could be via articles reviewing your business, via business associates or news sites. These backlinks prove to Google that you site is relevant and trustworthy.
• Keeping your website software (plugins & theme) up to date is imperative, as if your website is not up to date, you may incur security issues which can open your site up to being hacked.
• Create a sitemap for your website to ensure that each of your site’s pages can be found by search engines. By creating a sitemap, you are essentially assisting search engines in navigating through your website easily.

PPC Marketing

PPC: An effective Google Ads campaign allows businesses to bid on ads that are shown above/ more prominently than the organic search results.

• There are different type of ads: Search, Display, Shopping and YouTube Ads
  • Search ads are text ads that appear above or next to sites ranked organically.
  • Display ads are visual banners, promoted across multiple websites through the Google Display Network (GDN). GDN is made up of thousands of websites and allows you to connect with an even larger audience for greater brand awareness.
  • Shopping ads feature at the top of Google and make shopping online for products seamless before even having clicked through to the relevant business’s website. Superb for ecommerce stores!
  • YouTube ads assist in captivating your audience with Video ads.
• You only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
• PPC ads offer you the opportunity to reach a wider, targeted audience who are already searching for your product/ service.
• You are able to run multiple versions of your ads and target a specific group of people for each ad. For instance, you can target people in a certain area, using a certain device at a certain time of day. You can also promote a specific deal or product/s driving people to a dedicated landing page.

Running effective Google Ads campaigns can help garner the attention of more people online in the exact moment they’re searching for a business just like yours!

Should you invest in Google Ads or SEO?

SEO results cannot be guaranteed and is seen as a long-term solution, as it takes time to gain Google’s trust and keep up with Google’s ever-changing algorithms. Moving to page 1 of Google can take months, even years; depending on how competitive your industry is and how hard you’re willing to work on getting there.

Majority of people look online first when looking to connect with a new business, for credibility and trust. Your website’s presence is therefore imperative, along with your efforts to drive traffic there. We’re no longer in an era where people will find your site if you aren’t actively driving traffic there.

Therefore, one way or another, we need to ensure that your business appears in Google’s search results, whether it’s organically using SEO techniques or via an effective PPC (Google Ads) campaign.

Budget dependant, we generally propose running both SEO and Google Ads campaigns as a synergistic solution, for results in both the short -and long-term.

SEO efforts give your business the best chance of being found online without having to pay for every visit to your site in the long-term. Some consumers also trust the organic results more than paid for searches.

Google Ads on the other hand lets you reach potential customers immediately and lets you customise your campaign at any time for a quick turnaround time.

Final Thoughts on SEO and PPC