If you’re struggling to get the word out about your brand new business venture, you’re not alone. Like you, many business owners struggle to acquire customers in the beginning. Balancing the cost, maintenance, and results of a marketing campaign isn’t easy. Most of the time, the solution to this problem is one of two marketing strategies: search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. But which method is suitable for you?

In this article, we’ve explored what you can expect to achieve from each of these acquisition strategies. We’ve also provided some pros and cons of SEO and PPC strategies along with descriptive statistics and real-life examples to help you decide whether your business is best suited for SEO or PPC — or both.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the process of enhancing your website’s visibility to make it rank and gain organic traffic from search engines.

Just as you turn to your favorite search engines, such as Google or Bing, to look up a new marketing acronym or where to get good pizza, so do your consumers. When you invest in SEO, you’re increasing the likelihood of your target audience finding you when they make a Google search for keywords related to your product or service. In fact, 61% of marketers say that SEO is a top inbound marketing factor for their business. But it’s easier said than done.

SEO is the process of optimizing your pages to rank in a search engine’s organic results.

It typically involves four areas:

1. Keyword research

Keyword research is the process of understanding the words and phrases (keywords) your target customers use when searching on search engines. Finding these keywords usually involves using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer .

For example, here’s how we can find keywords for an online store that sells coffee products:

1. Brainstorm words and phrases potential customers may enter on Google
2. Enter them into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
3. Go to the Matching terms report

2. On-page SEO

On-page SEO is about creating the kind of content searchers want to see. Doing this involves figuring out why searchers are making the query. This is known as search intent .

For example, people searching for “how to make kefir” want to learn. You can see from the organic results that they want a step-by-step tutorial on how to make the fermented drink.

On the other hand, people searching for “basketball shoes” want to buy. The organic results show us pages of different basketball shoes on e-commerce websites.

Knowing search intent is important because you’ll want to align your content with it. But on-page SEO doesn’t just end with search intent. It also involves other important factors like:

• Strategically placing keywords, such as in the title.
• Creating a compelling title.
• Using short and descriptive URLs.
• Optimizing images.

And more.

3. Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is where you do things outside your site to show Google that your pages deserve to rank.

One of those things is building high-quality backlinks. This is important because backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors . They act like votes from other websites.

You can see who links to you using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer (free via Ahrefs Webmaster Tools ) by entering your domain and going to the Backlinks report.

Besides links, other important off-page factors (especially for local SEO ) include reviews, citations, and more.

4. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is all about making sure search engines can find, crawl, and index your content. This is important because you can’t rank if search engines don’t know you exist.

For example, if we block search engines from crawling this article, it’ll be unlikely that we’ll rank since they can’t see and understand what’s on the page.

Should you invest in SEO? Let’s look at the pros and cons of this marketing type .

Pros

Here are the advantages of SEO.

1. Organic traffic has staying power

As long as you can rank high on Google for your target keywords, you can get consistent search traffic to your website.

Theoretically, you could stop publishing for a while, and traffic would still continue to flow.

2. SEO can be cheaper in the long term

For example- the AHREFS blog ranks for over 95,000 keywords and gets an estimated 419,000 monthly organic visits.

If thye were to buy that traffic through PPC, it’d cost them an estimated $548,000 per month (or $6.5 million per year).

Given that our content team is <10 people and they’re not getting paid millions each in salaries, it’s reasonable to say that SEO is cheaper in the long run.

Cons

Here are some downsides to SEO.

1. SEO takes time

In 2017, we conducted a study to find out how long it takes to rank in Google . We discovered that only 22% of pages in the top 10 were published within a year.

It’s clear— SEO takes time . If your window for making an impact is short, SEO may not be the right strategy.

2. SEO requires unique and authoritative content

People want to learn from experts, or at least people who’ve walked the walk. This is especially true for important and sensitive topics like finance and health.

Google calls these Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics, and you’ll need to prove to Google that your website has the required expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) .

So to do well in search, you’ll likely need expertise.

Of course, all’s fine and dandy if you’re the domain expert. But if you’re constrained with limited resources, creating such content can be expensive and time-consuming.

3. Some keywords can be really competitive

Look at the SERPs for “basketball shoes”:

If you’re a new online store that sells basketball shoes, you’ll have to compete with established brands like Nike, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Foot Locker. It’s daunting.

So while these keywords may be dear to you, understand that it’s going to cost you tons of time, money, and effort to even begin competing. While not impossible, you’ll probably need to start from the bottom—target keywords with low difficulty , slowly build your website’s authority , and more.

What is PPC?

PPC, or pay-per-click, is a form of search engine marketing (SEM) where an advertiser pays a publisher (such as Google or Facebook) for each click someone makes on an ad. This model allows businesses to pay only when consumers interact with their ads. If you use PPC ads, you’ll attract people who are interested in your offer and ready to convert.

You may have noticed that some of the top search results are tagged with an “Ad” marker.

PPC ads always appear alongside organic search results. Some businesses run these search ads for specific marketing campaigns that have a definite start and end date. Others bid on their own brand name as part of their overall marketing strategy — like HelloFresh. Either way, this method is mainly associated with search engines as advertisers bid on keywords that are relevant to their target markets.

The cost of PPC ads usually depends on your industry and the search volume of the keyword you’re targeting.

PPC advertising can help your business stay competitive in a crowded market and quickly get in front of their target consumers if you don’t have the domain authority to get your site ranking organically on search engines.

Here’s what PPC advertising typically involves:

1. Keyword research

Just like how you choose to target a keyword for SEO, you’ll have to choose keywords to target for PPC advertising too. That means doing keyword research.

2. Bid setting

Bid setting is where you decide how much you’re willing to pay for an ad click. If competitors outbid you, the advertiser won’t show your ad much—leading to fewer clicks.

3. Ad creation

Ad creation is where you decide what your ad will say and where it will send people.

The ads you launch are given a Quality Score. This tells you how relevant and useful your ad is. Generally speaking, higher Quality Scores mean your ads will be seen by more people, and you’ll also pay less for clicks.

4. Audience targeting

Audience targeting is where you decide who should see your ad. You can target people based on who they are, what they’re interested in, where they are, and much more.

Should you invest in PPC? Here are the pros and cons.

Pros

What are some advantages of PPC?

1. PPC is fast

PPC is almost instant. You can head over to any ad platform and start a campaign right away.

2. PPC allows for granular targeting

Most PPC platforms will allow you to choose who you want to target (e.g., demographics, geography, interests, etc.).

3. PPC allows for quick experimentation

The nature of PPC is fast feedback. You can set up a campaign, run A/B tests, and monitor the results to see what works and what doesn’t.

Comparatively, SEO takes time and, thus, it can be difficult to attribute success or failure to any single individual change or tactic.

Cons

PPC is not all sunshine and roses. There are some downsides.

1. PPC can get prohibitively expensive

If you’re in a competitive industry like insurance, PPC can get expensive fast.

For example, it can cost you $40 per click on average if you’re bidding on the keyword “car insurance.”

2. PPC can lose effectiveness

Andrew Chen writes :

The longer your campaigns run, the less effective they become—people start seeing your ads too often. The messaging becomes stale, and novelty effects are real.

PPC is not set-it-and-forget-it either. Ad blindness is real. You’ll have to constantly refresh your existing ads (headline, copy, images, etc.) to make them work in the long term.

3. You’ll need money to make money

PPC means you’ll need a budget to begin a campaign. You may even lose money in the first few months as you figure out how to optimize your campaigns.

How to Make SEO and PPC Work For You

Instead of choosing between SEO or PPC, why not combine the two strategies and make them work for you?

Here’s how you can get the best of both worlds.

1. Create retargeting ads.

Did someone visit your site, probably the pricing or check-out page, without buying?

You can easily use a retargeting ad to prompt these visitors, even after they’ve left your site, to come back and make a purchase.

2. Promote website content with social media ads.

While you want your content to rank organically, you can give it a quick boost by promoting it on social media.

Not only do these kinds of ads help with content distribution, but they could potentially help you acquire essential backlinks that’d boost your rankings.

Also, it’s going to be a shame not to promote your latest blog post, guide, report, or case study after spending hours creating it.

3. Collect data From ads to improve your SEO strategy.

PPC campaigns grant you access to a lot of data — keyword search volumes, keywords your competitors are bidding for, highest converting calls-to-action, and so on.

Aimed with all of this data, you’d be able to create better SEO strategies with less effort.

SEO vs. PPC Statistics

SEO

• Google is responsible for over 92.47% of global web traffic.
• 90.63% of online content gets zero traffic from Google, with only 0.21% getting over 1000 visits per month.
• 35.18% of browser-based Google searches resulted in an organic link click in 2020.
• 99.2% of website pages have less than 100 backlinks.
• Google processes over 5.6 billion searches per day (or 2 trillion searches per year.)
• 64% of marketers actively invest in SEO.

PPC

• The Google Display Network reaches 90% of Internet users worldwide.
• Search advertising spending was $144.8 billion in 2021, compared to $58 billion in 2020.
• The average Facebook Ads Click-Through Rate across all industries is 1.1%.

Final Thoughts

Whether you choose to go with SEO or PPC ultimately depends on your business situation. So take your time to evaluate the pros and cons of both SEO and PPC to see which is the right fit for you. And if possible, integrate the two strategies to see even more outstanding results for your business.

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