Most small businesses focus on getting their first group of customers through the door. They often consider leveraging the huge online marketplace to find and approach prospects.
When it comes to digital marketing, driving traffic is vital to the success of most online endeavors. Your success often depends on the amount of traffic you are able to generate to your web pages.
The point of contention is whether you should use SEO or PPC to generate traffic. Though both of these strategies aim to increase traffic, they work differently.
When Should You Choose SEO?
Leveraging SEO can not only help you improve your online presence but can also help you drive targeted traffic to your website. It takes time to drive significant results with SEO but the results are substantial and are most likely to last longer.
You should choose to use SEO when you have ample time and you want to improve the authority and credibility of your brand.
SEO Case Study
Back in April 2018, Mario Deal, an SEO expert, was asked to increase the traffic of a health and fitness website. Though the site already received 68K visitors per month, they weren’t able to outrank their competitors, who were receiving 100K or more visitors per month.
Mario used basic SEO strategies to quadruple their traffic in six months. He updated old content, optimized it with relevant keywords, and started guest posting. Along with this, he also improved their on-page SEO by cleaning up 404 error pages and tweaking titles.
When Should You Choose PPC?
With PPC advertising, you need to place an ad in search results for relevant keywords to drive visitors. Every time someone clicks on your ad, you will have to pay a small fee to the search engine.
PPC campaigns can bring you immediate results in terms of a boost in traffic. You should use this strategy when you need to increase the visibility of your brand and drive targeted traffic, and you’re running out of time.
PPC Case Study
A South African hotel chain, Southern Sun, lost their previous organic search rankings and traffic flow when they launched their new website. They needed to generate instant traffic to ensure a steady flow of bookings.
For this, they ran a PPC campaign to attract and engage their prospects and increase the number of bookings made on their new site.
The campaign was a success and their website received an average of 7,500 clicks per month for the first three months. Simultaneously, they also generated trust from search engines, which helped them improve their organic search rankings.
SEO vs. PPC
Both of these strategies have their own set of advantages and it can be difficult to choose one. To help you choose the tactic that can best meet your requirements, we’ve shared an infographic by SpyFu below.
