Every business owner is aware of the importance of online marketing practices, and surely, SEO and PPC. Even if you don’t, the fact that you’re reading this article means you making the steps to become enlightened.

The reason for this isn’t far-fetched.

If you own a business, then you must have a product or service to sell. If you can’t show potential customers what you have in store for them, your business will most likely fail or never reach its full potential.

Now, this is where SEO and PPC come in. These two are equally essential and effective digital marketing strategies increase website visbilty and brand awareness.

But which should you invest in?

The thing is, their effectiveness varies depending on your goal, that way, you can decide on when to invest in any of them.

Aim: Fast Results

With SEO, it will take time (between months) before your optimized keywords get to rank on the first or even second page of SERP results. But that’s if you do it right. Else, it will take an even longer period.

On the flip side, running a PPC campaign gets you an almost immediate boost to the very top of the SERP results for your optimized keyword.

Verdict: PPC is the strategy to invest in if you want instant results or better conversion rates.

Aim: Wide Reach

If you run a PPC campaign, its reach will only be limited to the SERP of that particular search engine. For example, a Google Ads campaign is only limited to Google, Bing Ads to Bing, etc. If you then decide to run the campaign across all platforms for a wider reach, you will eat through your budget in no time.

On another hand, a good SEO strategy will allow your business rank on multiple search engines for the same keywords. At worse, there might only be a slight ranking difference across the search engines.

Verdict: SEO is the strategy to invest in for a wider reach

Aim: Budget

Keeping expenses to the barest minimum is perhaps the target of most, if not all small and large businesses. Well, with PPC, you must have a fat budget.

PPC can become unbearably expensive for small businesses, especially in competitive industries with high CPC. It could easily run over thousands to millions of dollars, with a higher possibility of this happening if the campaign is done right.

If you hire a professional SEO agency, it will cost you far less to attract the same traffic compared to a pay-per-click campaign or even more.

Verdict: Organic search is easily the victor here.

Aim: Credibility

The key aim of a true SEO strategy is to make your website an authority within your industry. This makes your website show up on the first page of the SERPs when your target audience searches for keywords that are related to your service or product.

Nonetheless, PPC ads will still rank above organic searches. But customers are more likely to click on the organic results because they find them to be more credible and not salesy.

Verdict: SEO is the strategy to invest in if credibility is what you find.

Ultimate Aim: Beating Your Competitors

The main reason you’ll consider SEO or PPC in the first place, is to perform, rank, or sell better than your competitors.

This is where there is no victor, and only collaboration of both strategies will be your best bet.

Let’s face it, your competitors, if they are any good, are using both strategies. So, you have to do that and do it better than them.

For instance, PPC campaigns can give you info on high-performing keywords that you can then retarget in your SEO strategy as well.

Need Help With Your SEO & PPC Strategy?

Managing an SEO or PPC campaign requires a lot of time and a good amount of technical expertise. As a business owner, you most likely can’t handle a campaign for one of these reasons.

If that’s the case, you can contact our team of search engine marketing experts at Blazingbronco. Plus, try out our free site audit for a diagnostic of your SEO practices.