Developing Your Digital Marketing Strategy: SEO vs PPC
When you are ready to take digital marketing more seriously, then you need to develop a digital marketing plan to promote your business. You now realise that your website is more than just a brochure for your business on the Internet and can be a means of attracting and engaging with your customers and prospects. How do you develop this strategy? What tools and tactics are available for an online marketing strategy? There are two basic sets of tactics that you need to understand when you develop a digital marketing strategy. The first is known as organic search tactics which usually involve some form of search engine optimisation. The second are paid internet advertisements, often called pay-per-click because you must pay for each click on your ad. It is important to understand these two basic tactics to begin Internet marketing.
How Search Engines Work.
There are millions of people using the Internet each day. Typically, they go to a popular search engine, type in a keyword that they believe will take them to what they are looking for and then view the results. The search engine has indexed the millions of websites on the Internet and has an algorithm to identify sites that are relevant to the keyword typed in by the user. These results are known as organic search results because they are the natural products of the search engine algorithm. Businesses can also pay for a prominent place in the results for a given keyword. When the search engine displays the results for a specific keyword, it places the advertisements relevant to the keyword in the first few spots and then in a sidebar. It displays the organic results below the ads. The visitor to the search engine views the results and clicks on something that looks interesting. You want to develop an Internet strategy that gets your website featured prominently in the search engine results for relevant keywords and attracts the attention of the human who ultimately decides which sites he is going to visit.
What Is SEO?
By using effective SEO tactics, you can take advantage of what we know about the way search engines work to appear at the top of the organic search results for specific keywords. By developing high-quality content, using social media effectively and creating a network of authoritative links to your site, you can demonstrate to the search engines that you will provide high-quality content for searchers. This will result in a high ranking in the organic search results. It is like planting an orchard or a garden; there is a lot of work up front to prepare the ground, but the results can be abundant. You will not see the results of SEO overnight, but with consistent effort, these results will come. Once you put in the initial effort, traffic will flow to your website with very little maintenance required. Best of all, many of the tactics involved in SEO have comparatively lower costs than other marketing tactics include paid Internet advertising. SEO tactics are necessary for a successful long-term digital marketing strategy.
What Is PPC?
Advertising on the Internet is typically done on a pay-per-click basis. Advertisers pay for every person that clicks on their ad. The cost of each click is determined by the popularity of the keyword that the ad targets. Advertisers can also bid more for each keyword to make sure that their ad appears more frequently in searches for the keywords they are targeting. These ads appear at the top of the search results page. PPC works like tap water. If you spend money on the advertising, traffic will flow to your site like water through the tap. When you stop spending money, traffic will stop just like the water stops when you close the tap.
Effective Digital Marketing Strategy With SEO and PPC.
To develop an effective digital marketing strategy, you will need to effectively blend together SEO and PPC tactics. If you have a large advertising budget, you can rely on PPC tactics to drive traffic. The only problem is that if you run out of money, your traffic will stop as well. PPC alone is not an effective strategy for long-term digital marketing. If you have a smaller advertising budget, you can employ less expensive SEO tactics. It will just take time, sometimes three to six months, to really start seeing results. This may occupy a large amount of your time for a few months before you generate many leads. So a strategy that employs only SEO tactics can be effective in the long run, but it is not a good short-term solution. A more effective strategy blends SEO and PPC tactics. At the early stages, you will be putting a lot of effort into your SEO tactics without seeing much in the way of results. Supplementing these tactics with PPC is appropriate if you have the budget. The PPC advertising will drive traffic to your site, generating leads and customers while you are developing traffic from your organic SEO tactics. Eventually, you can ease off your spending on PPC and rely on the traffic from your SEO tactics. Another way to effectively use PPC tactics to complement SEO is in limited campaigns. For example, if you have a special offer that you want to promote, PPC is effective at doing this. You can make a limited spend to advertise the offer and when the promotion is over you can simply stop paying for the ads and the traffic will stop. SEO and PPC can both be used in an effective digital marketing strategy. When you properly understand the role of each of these sets of tactics, then you can deploy them effectively in your online marketing. How do you balance SEO and PPC in your marketing? Let us know by leaving a comment.
