SEO vs PPC | Where Should You Spend Your Small Business’s Marketing Budget?
As a small business owner, your marketing budget is tight and needs to be used wisely. SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (Pay-per-click advertisements) are two of the most effective tools to grow your business, and you’ve probably had people try to sell you both.
In this blog, we’ll outline the pros and cons of both SEO and PPC and compare the two marketing techniques. We hope by the end of this blog, you’ll have a better understanding of which modern marketing tool you should be focusing on to enhance your business’s growth strategy.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is at the heart of many successful marketing strategies. When someone has a question like “How should I grow my small business?”, the first thing they do is check their favorite search engine. The search engine then presents them with the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), which is full of websites and articles that address their inquiry. If your website or a blog you wrote pops up on the first SERP, then your content is reaching your audience at the best time — when they’re looking for it. SEO is particularly good for generating local business, so service providers trying to bring in more local clients should seriously consider an SEO strategy.
When most people think of SEO, they think of stuffing the back end of their website with keywords; however, there is another way to boost your ranking on Google that doesn’t require any complicated website techniques. For business owners looking to boost their SEO on a budget, we recommend utilizing a business blog. Long-form content not only boosts your SEO but also serves as a tool to educate both new and existing customers on key topics in your industry, giving you credibility as a thought leader in your field.
Consistent content creation organically generates SEO for your website. Here’s an easy way to think of it: Your website is the engine of your digital footprint. The engine drives sales and generates business. However, your engine needs fuel to keep running. If you want to keep your sales machine running, you need to be consistently fueling it with more content. That content will boost your SEO ranking, thus bringing traffic to your website.
Pros:
- Organic SEO lasts indefinitely and ripens with age. Once you create the content, it continuously generates traffic and builds credibility with your audience.
- When you build SEO through a blog, you also end up with a gallery of content that you can use as sales tools. Think of how much time you spend answering FAQs, wouldn’t it be nice to just answer them once?
- SEO enables your marketing tools, whether it be a blog or your website, to reach prospects when it matters most — when they’re looking!
Cons:
- It’s important to understand that SEO is a long-term marketing strategy and the results can’t be forced overnight. If you want to boost your SEO, it’s important to develop a long-term strategy with clear objectives.
- Generic Keywords are competitive, so it’s important to target as specific of an audience as you can. This means businesses with a highly targeted audience are inclined to thrive with an SEO strategy.
PPC
Advertisements are everywhere. When you’re scrolling through your favorite social media feed, the number of ads you see can be overwhelming. In fact, WhistleOut recently conducted a study that concluded peak ad saturation on social media feeds can reach up to 42%, meaning 4 out of 10 posts are advertisements.
The sheer quantity of advertisements is a testament to the effectiveness of the marketing strategy. Advertising is more powerful and smarter than ever before. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tik-Tok, and even our search engines all collect data on our daily usage and interactions. They know how much time we spend looking at a page, how often we visit it, and where we went when we left the page.
With this information, advertisers are able to design extremely effective and targeted PPC campaigns that reach people based on who they are, where they are, what they’re researching, their interests, or how they have interacted with various businesses. Facebook ads are especially useful for reaching a specific target audience due to the ability to target specific zip codes and age demographics (ex. if you are looking for high net worth clients).
Ad campaigns are an ideal tool for businesses trying to sell their products via an eCommerce website or market an event like a show, webinar, or meet-up. Here at White Wolf, we often utilize a re-targeted advertisement strategy where the first wave of advertisements goes out to a broadly targeted audience, and then a second wave goes out directly to the people who engaged with the previous ad. Thus, we effectively engage with a warm audience and provide information to the people most interested in the product or service.
Pros:
- Targeted/re-targeted advertisements utilize data in an extremely effective manner. You can micro-target your exact audience and find them at the right place and time.
- Often, people don’t know what they want until they see it. Ads help you reach the people who would be interested in your service/product even if they aren’t looking for it at that moment.
- Advertising campaigns give you access to a robust set of analytical information. You can use this data to learn about your audience, A/B test new strategies, and optimize your sales funnel.
Cons:
- Advertising campaigns can be expensive if not done correctly. If you don’t have a solid strategy for your Facebook Ads, mistakes can eat up your marketing budget very quickly with no ROI to show for it.
- Facebook Advertising has become over-saturated which has caused the pricing of advertising to dramatically increase.
- It’s a social network, not a business network. People aren’t primarily there to be sold, they’re looking at posts from their family and friends. However, just by looking at the recent growth of Facebook Marketplace, we can see that there is a place for sales on the platform.
Comparison
When devising marketing strategies with our clients, we often use this metaphor to help them quickly understand the major use cases for ads (PPC) and content marketing (SEO):
Running advertisements is like planting flowers. The bright colors are beautiful, and It’s the most immediate way to get attention to your garden. But, the lifespan of flowers is short-lived, and every season you have to keep replanting them — if you want to curate a flower garden, you must be excited to plant seeds time after time. Similarly, your ad campaigns will need to be frequently re-assessed in order to achieve optimal results.
Generating organic SEO is like planting a tree. You have to start small, and it takes a long time for it to grow from a sapling to a tree. But once it’s there, it’s the gift that keeps on giving! Trees provide shade, fruit, and even oxygen for those who visit your garden, which means people are inclined to stay and hang out. To maintain the many benefits of your tree, you have to keep watering and pruning it. Similarly, SEO is maintained through consistent content creation, which is why long-term SEO strategies are some of the most successful.
Conclusion
At White Wolf Marketing, we use both SEO and PPC ads to help our clients achieve their business growth goals. Both tools have their time and place, so it’s difficult to tell you which you should use at your small business without first learning about your unique situation. When making a marketing strategy, it’s important to weigh a variety of factors such as your industry, objective, and budget to figure out which tool (or combination of tools) will optimally benefit you. If you’re not sure whether your business would benefit from SEO or PPC ads, we’d love to help you figure out the best strategy based on your business goals. Just submit a contact form on our website and we’ll get in touch with you promptly!
