Long Term Value Vs Short Term Gain: What's Right For Your Business?
Once upon a time, developing your company’s online presence was straightforward.
These days, however, creating a successful business is a lot more complicated. It takes more than simply building a website and publishing it online. If you want to flourish in online business, the importance of finding the right marketing techniques cannot but emphasized enough.
To reach your business goals you need to develop and implement a comprehensive digital marketing plan. While it requires more time and research than ever in order to excel, the payoff is well worth the investment of an intelligently designed marketing plan.
Alternatively, a poorly designed campaign will result in lost business and must be avoided at all costs. But where to begin?
When devising your digital marketing strategy, a little knowledge on organic traffic versus paid traffic goes a long way. Before you get overwhelmed by the sea of marketing options available to you, let’s start with the basics.
Organic Traffic
When we talk about organic traffic, we’re referring to all the users who have landed on your website because they clicked your listed link on a search engine’s result pages.
Whether you appear on the first, second, or six hundredth search engine result page (SERP) has a great impact on how much organic traffic you receive.
Your positioning is determined primarily by your search engine optimization (SEO) methods.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a toolbox of techniques and strategies designed to bring visitors to a website by ensuring that the website is highly visible in the organic search engine results.
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic, as the name suggests, is what we call traffic that has navigated to your website by links that you’ve paid for.
This comes in many different forms, such as ads on banners or ads on the sidebar. Most search engines also offer this manner of advertising, and list paid links before their organic search listings.
These are pay per click (PPC) forms of advertising.
What is Pay Per Click (PPC)?
Pay Per Click (PPC) is a model of internet advertising in which the advertiser pays per user click on the advertisement, driving traffic to a website.
SEO vs PPC
SEO
- Benefits Increase With Age – Your SEO efforts continue to bring you long-lasting results.
- Produces Organic Results – Many people prefer quality native results over advertisements.
- Results Are Gradual – For best results, SEO is a solid foundation that is built over time.
- Provides Authority To A Website – Excellent SEO adds value and credibility to your online presence.
- Requires Maintenance – For best results, your SEO strategy needs to be maintained and optimized over time.
- Hard To See ROI Immediately – SEO is a marathon, not a sprint – the benefits are generally felt in the future.
PPC
- Quicker Setup and Results – It doesn’t take much to get started with a PPC campaign.
- Easy Conversion Tracking – Tracking the success or failure of a PPC campaign is simple.
- Provides No Ongoing Value – Once you end a campaign, there’s no long lasting benefit to your site.
- Does Not Add Credibility To A Website – Paid advertisement is just that – you cannot purchase website authority.
- Requires Regular Optimization – A Successful PPC campaign requires constant monitoring and vigilance.
- Immediate ROI Value – When you pay to play, you reap the rewards immediately.
So which direction should you go, SEO or PPC?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is fundamental in landing your business listing first-page placement on the SERPs.
If you aren’t employing SEO properly, then the search engines can’t understand your business and won’t send the traffic you want your way. Professional SEO draws the right kind of attention and builds your website’s reputation with search engines, letting them know that your website is credible and reliable.
It takes time to prove your standing, however, so it’s essential that you remain patient and continue to update your SEO strategy regularly.
Pay Per Click (PPC) is entirely more clear cut than SEO.
PPC account setup has a more standard procedure and tracking return on investment (ROI) is easy. You can very readily see if your PPC campaign is benefiting you or if it’s flopping. It’s also simple to update your strategy and note your expenses.
As with anything in digital marketing, you must be vigilant about optimizing, else wise your PPC plan will grow stale and eventually hurt you. Keep in mind there are also no lasting effects with PPC and it does not help build your website’s authority.
Here’s the secret to propelling your business ahead of the competition: the best digital marketing strategy integrates both SEO and PPC
Incorporating SEO strategies into your PPC plan enhances your ability to connect with your target audience. The data you learn from a PPC campaign can direct your SEO efforts and provide you with valuable information about what most appeals to your clients.
Not only that, but you have an opportunity to be listed multiple times at the top of SERPs which reflects your ability to best service user’s needs. An integrated digital marketing strategy run by experts will help you surpass your competition and make you the leader in your industry.
Investing in both SEO and PPC is a winning combination!