PPC vs SEO for Small Businesses
Are you sure you know what these mean and their relative benefits and disadvantages?
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the practice of maximizing the visibility of a website in “organic search,” that is, the results on Google or any search engine that are not paid advertisements, i.e. you do not pay the search engine to be shown on the page.
Billions of searches are done every year for every kind of product and service, and search engine companies, like Google and Microsoft Bing, make their money by being the place that people go to get their information, products, and services. When search engines stop being the best, their users migrate elsewhere, and their no longer can sell advertisements along-side their organic results.
Search engines do not make money from their organic results. It is a bait to lure users to their websites so they can sell advertisements. Search engines want to show visitors the sites that they want to see.
Methods to achieve this goal can be categorized as either white hat or black hat.
Black Hat SEO and Its Risks
Black Hat SEO methods are those that try to exploit a known feature of a search engine algorithm to gain visibility. Early black hat techniques included including keywords thousands or millions in invisible text or paying a third party to link to your site. While there have certainly been black hat success cases, there are also dangers. Whenever a black hat technique gets too popular, search engines rewrite their algorithms to reconsider these attributes or even push websites that seem to be cheating. If you get caught buying links, plagiarizing other websites, or otherwise trying to manipulate search engines, those search engines may punish you.
White-Hat SEO Methods
These are the practices that search engines and webmasters recommend. It includes everything from making sure your website encodes information in ways that are readable to search engines, to writing quality content and creating interesting graphics. At the most basic level, good SEO practices are those that let your visitors know when they have found what they are looking for.
PPC – Pay-Per-Click Advertisements
Pay-Per-Click advertisements are links shown to visitors of other websites. Unlike other forms of marketing, you only pay when someone visits your website via the paid link. So if no one clicks your ad, you pay no money. By displaying your ad to potential clients who are looking for a product or service that you sell and are in your area (if that is important), PPC campaigns are incredibly customizable, and with a properly run campaign, you can know with a high degree of accuracy how effective your marketing is and how much you are paying per new client.
With PPC, your goal is to maximize the clicks per dollar and convert those visits to your website into clients and sales, however the amount that you pay per click can change day to day and even hour to hour. All of the major PPC vendors employ an auction system to determine how much a click should cost for a given search. Within these dynamic pricing systems, you or your PPC campaign manager create a logical pricing system with a set rules that will select where your ad is displayed and how much you are willing to pay for a click. For example, you