Some debates just never go away: vanilla vs. chocolate, Kobe vs. Lebron, Yankees vs. Red Sox (OK, no contest there – you can’t argue with 27 titles). The equivalent to these in the online marketing world is SEO vs PPC. Is it better to build organically or pay for ads? This question has left many businesses scratching their heads.
Why would you ever pay extra hard-earned money to rank for keywords that you are already ranking for organically? It doesn’t make sense, does it? Some people claim that PPC will devour your fragile SEO, while still others claim that it is a waste of money when your SEO is doing the job already. Thankfully, a group of experts set out to tackle the issue once and for all. A team of researchers at Google have found that in the battle of SEO vs PPC, the winner is: both.
What is PPC?
Basically, PPC is the paid search results or “sponsored ads” that you see on the google SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Some are on the top, while others are gracefully set out along the side as to discretely blend in with the organic results that occupy the middle. Google’s strategy is to be as non-intrusive as possible. When you want to rank for certain keywords, you pay to show up when they are searched for. If I open up “Kevin’s High Noon Saloon,” and want to rank for “country bars” in my local area, I bid for those keywords, and my place shows up in the sponsored ads (kind of, but you get the point).
Do they help each other?
Some fear that PPC will cannibalize your organic traffic. What they mean by cannibalize is basically that it will take some or a lot of your organic traffic away, and result in a net loss of clicks; however, a recent study conducted by Google has shown just the opposite of that. The study’s findings showed that PPC has a positive effect on site visitors of 89% on top of the organic rate. It makes sense though, doesn’t it?
How?
Using a PPC campaign to compliment your organic results is a powerful tool in generating business. For example, you could use a PPC campaign to better evaluate your site for organic growth. If you use PPC, then you can see which words are bringing in the most traffic, and what words are getting people to buy. On top of that, some pay-per-click tools can show you which groups of keywords are bringing in value. This could be used as an invaluable asset to determine how to prioritize topics on your web page. A PPC campaign also offers benefits for meta-tags, keywords, and descriptions. It’s no doubt that any webpage using PPC has a leg up on those just going the organic route.
The research at Google just confirmed what most of us had expected all along: PPC and SEO aren’t fighting each other, they are helping each other. By running an effective PPC campaign, you gain invaluable benefits to your organic SEO. If you use things like keywords, topics, meta-descriptions and more, your site will be well on its way to the top of the page.
If you want to dominate the first page of Google, try BlueHat Marketing’s Hybrid SEO and PPC Services
