SEO vs PPC: Difference, Pros And Cons In 2024

SEO is the process of refining your website so it ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines employ bots to crawl through all website pages and use complex algorithms to categorize the pages based on known and unknown factors. SEO practices play to the known factors in the most favorable ways in order to rank web pages higher in SERPs while also ensuring web pages provide useful and relevant content.

SEO is broken down into on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to tailoring the actual content of your web pages for better rankings. For example: placing keywords and phrases that are commonly searched for by your target audience in the title of a blog post and throughout the blog copy itself. Off-page SEO is when you improve your page rankings without changing the contents of your website—such as implementing a backlink campaign. Good SEO results in more organic traffic, which is traffic that comes from search results, not ads.

While there are clear advantages to generating organic traffic, SEO comes with a few challenges. Here are some of the pros and cons to this approach.

Pros

• Lower cost long term. SEO is inexpensive compared to PPC where you are charged every time someone clicks on your link. With SEO, you do not need to constantly reinvest into ads to maintain visibility.
• Organic traffic lasts. You can sustain organic traffic derived from SEO through ongoing optimization efforts. Once you’ve ranked high in SERPs, these efforts help you maintain your position.
• Increased brand credibility. Good SEO also requires you to improve your audience’s experience by providing informative, specific content relevant to their needs. Producing such content also improves your reputation and credibility over time.

Cons

• SEO requires expertise. Developing and maintaining an effective SEO strategy isn’t something you can cook up overnight. You’ll need to either learn the ropes yourself or hire professionals who specialize in these endeavors.
• Search engine algorithms can change. Search engines update their algorithms regularly, which may result in a sudden drop in page rankings.
• Your website will need regular upkeep. If you want your web pages to maintain their rankings, you’ll need to optimize them in a consistent cadence as long as they are live.
• Success with SEO takes time. Depending on several factors such as building a website from scratch or the competitiveness of your search terms, it can take weeks or months before you see any results from your hard SEO work.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a digital marketing strategy where a business bids to have its advertisements appear on SERPs (usually in the premium top position) to a user searching for specific keywords. When users click on these ads, the business pays the publisher the amount it bid. Competition for the top PPC ad spots can be aggressive and costly depending on the keywords. If someone else outbids you, the publisher will not show your ad as often or at all.

PPC has become a popular marketing strategy because of its ability to increase visibility and traffic quickly; however, these advantages can come at high financial cost. Consider the following pros and cons to PPC advertising.

Pros

• Top page ranking. The most obvious benefit of PPC is holding the top positions on SERPs—leading to more traffic and conversions.
• Fast results. Since you can simply outbid your competition to snatch the top page rankings, PPC generates traffic much faster than the slow burn of SEO.
• Quick and easy ad experimentation. You can set up and alter PPC ads quickly, which allows you to run simultaneous ads with small key differences to see which ones perform better.
• More effective targeting. PPC campaigns allow you to pinpoint your target audience with personalized messaging for specific geographic regions, interests, behaviors and more.

Cons

• The expense. Every time your audience clicks your link, you pay. Additionally, competitive keywords and industries tend to have higher bids, which increases costs even more. For worthwhile results, you will need to invest significantly in a PPC campaign.
• Bidding wars. You may get in bidding wars with competitors, which can rapidly increase costs in both the short and long term.
• Your visibility depends on your funds. If your funds dry up, your ads are immediately removed from SERPs, which can result in huge traffic losses.
• Sponsored ads can age. In competitive spaces, PPC ads can all start to look the same—or they just get old—which can cause ad fatigue in audiences. To stay effective, PPC ads require regular refreshing and attention.

Choosing between SEO and PPC depends on many factors such as your business goals, budget, business/team size and more. Keep in mind that you aren’t limited to just one or the other—you can effectively use PPC and SEO together. Consider the following scenarios to help you decide which marketing strategy is better for you and your unique needs.

Use SEO if:

• You have a small budget.
• You want long-term, consistent results.
• You create informational content.
• You are trying to build brand authority for a niche product or subject.
• You want to increase the value of your website in order to sell it.

Use PPC if:

• You need results as quickly as possible.
• You are hosting an event or using a special one-time offer to increase traffic.
• You sell a unique product and wish to promote it to increase visibility.
• You want to maximize conversions.
• You want to target a very specific audience.

How to use SEO and PPC together:

• In order to increase the visibility of high-quality content, use promotional PPC ads to boost SEO rankings faster.
• If some of your audience organically visits your content but doesn’t convert, all is not lost! You can retarget these users through PPC ads to increase your chances of bringing them back and converting them.
• Increase your reputation and authority by having both organic and paid visibility.
• Use PPC ads to test keyword strategies before you implement them in SEO.

SEO and PPC offer distinctly different marketing approaches in order to achieve more visibility, traffic and conversions in your business’s web pages. While SEO costs much less than PPC on paper—and the organic traffic it creates is more suited to long-term, consistent growth—it can take a long time to build momentum. It also tends to be time-consuming and may require hiring expertise to be effective. PPC, on the other hand, can put your page on top of the SERPs within a day, but it has upfront costs that may dig significantly into your marketing budget.

Neither of these approaches are inherently better than the other, rather they both have use cases depending on the needs and goals of a particular business. It’s also often a great idea to use SEO and PPC together as they are able to complement each other.