SEO and PPC are both effective and popular digital marketing strategies that involve using Google search to increase your website’s exposure. They both require monetary investment, the exact degree of which depends on the scope of your project.
In this post, we’re going to find out which of these two strategies provides the better return on investment (ROI).
Note: ROI is a measure of how much money a particular venture makes as compared to the costs it demands.
What is SEO? Brief Explanation and Main Costs
To get a better understanding of these two strategies and their respective ROI, let’s first cover a brief explanation for both along with a list of their main costs.
Definition of SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is one of the most popular marketing strategies used nowadays.
SEO is the name collectively given to the activities that are performed to improve a website’s ranking in the search results.
The purpose of performing SEO is to get a website to rank higher in the SERPs when it is searched by a user.
To make a website more SEO-friendly, different steps are performed, including:
- Creating and publishing high-quality content on the website
- Improving the website’s loading speed and user experience
- Engaging in social media marketing to improve the website’s popularity and authority
- Building backlinks from other websites
And so on.
SEO covers a wide range of activities, and the aforementioned steps are just some of them.
The Main Costs of SEO
Now let’s discuss some of the main costs that are incurred when you choose SEO as your marketing strategy.
- Content creation costs: SEO requires high-quality content to be created and published on the regular. This is a constant cost that has to be kept in mind.
- Website maintenance costs: In SEO, it is important for the website to be kept in tip-top shape so that it provides a smooth user experience. For example, the loading speed has to be optimized by enhancing the on-page elements whenever there is a change in the design, etc. Maintenance like this can rack up costs in the long-term. but it also raises the question: How much does it cost for website maintenance? The long-term costs can add up, depending on factors like updates, security patches, and hosting upgrades.
- Web development costs: Maintaining web pages is one thing, but developing and building them from scratch is another. In SEO, you have to do both. Oftentimes, you may need to create webpages to add value to your website. This web development also comes with a price.
- Link building costs: Link building is one of the most popular off-page SEO techniques. It involves acquiring inbound links from other websites to make your website more authoritative in the eyes of the search engines. If you hire professional link building services, it can be a recurring charge that you have to take into account.
- SEO tools: SEO requires keyword research, content research, domain analysis, and other types of analytics on a regular basis. To perform them, you may have to purchase paid SEO tools. You can also use free SEO tools to save cost, but this changes depending on the situation.
Note: Platforms like Dnschecker.org provide an entire suite of online tools, including SEO tools, completely for free. Using a platform like this can help you save costs in the long run.
What is PPC? Brief Explanation and Main Costs
Now, let’s move on to PPC.
Definition of PPC
PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is a marketing strategy in which you are charged for each click on your advertisement. In search engines, PPC refers specifically to the type of marketing in which an ad for your website is placed at the top of the SERPs, bypassing the need to organically score a high rank.
What to Know About PCC
In theory, PPC sounds great, and may seem like the unequivocally better marketing choice. However, it is not as great as it sounds. Here are some points to consider about PPC.
- Many people don’t trust ads in search engines. The fact that the results are up there because of payments is known by many. People prefer to bypass the ads and click on the organic results instead.
- It can be very expensive, especially if you’re targeting high-volume keywords for your ad campaign.
- It provides a momentary boost to your website, but once you stop the campaign, your website recedes down into the unknown.
The Main Costs of PPC
In a PPC campaign, your website will be shown at the top of the search results as long as you pay the search engine. It doesn’t matter if the website itself has issues in the UI/UX design, content, etc.
Keeping that in mind, the main costs of PPC are as follows:
- Web development: Whatever the campaign may be, as long as you are using search engines, you do need to have a website. For that, you have to hire web development services. This is one of the major costs that you have to keep in mind for PPC.
- Marketing copies/content: Even when your website is projected to the top of the SERPs, you still need to have an engaging marketing copy to attract users. You need to have an engaging title, meta description, as well as a compelling on-page copy. For this, you need to hire a copywriter.
- Ad cost: Last but not least is the ad cost itself. This is the most formidable of all the costs that you’ll have to bear during a PPC campaign. The CPC (cost per click) can vary vastly depending on the keywords that you’re targeting. For example, keywords in a marketing niche can cost significantly lower than keywords in the legal/finance industry.
Which Strategy Provides Better ROI? SEO or PPC?
Now let’s come to the main answer: which of these two strategies provides the better return on investment (ROI).
- For long-term investments, SEO is the better choice. It provides better results in the long-term.
- For short-term investments, PPC is better as it can drive quick results.
Here is an explanation on both of these points:
SEO is a long-term approach, and it focuses on building a website’s authority that can benefit it for years to come. Once you invest in SEO, you can expect a huge ROI in the form of ad revenue, an increase in traffic (which means an increase in the paid models that you may set up on your site), and more. The benefits of SEO come after a while, but they come to stay.
SEO is better for people who want to start a blog or a SaaS platform; something that thrives on repetitive visits.
On the other hand, PPC is better for a short-term approach. It focuses on giving your website boosted visibility in the SERPs for as long as you pay the ad costs. This can be excellent for a short-term project, such as an e-commerce store sale.
It can also be great if you are relying on visitors to remember your website and come back to it later on, even when the ads are turned off. If this type of plan is well-executed, it can organically boost the site’s traffic as well, and give you the best of both worlds: PPC and SEO.
Wrapping Up
Both SEO and PPC are excellent marketing strategies as long as they are executed properly. They provide excellent ROI. However, SEO provides better ROI in the long-term, while PPC is better for short-term campaigns.
The trick to achieving the right ROI for any of these strategies is to make sure you follow all the best practices and spend money where it is needed. You can gain an understanding of all this by hiring a reputable SEO/PPC agency to help you out.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article, and we hope that you learned a thing or two about both of these strategies.
