Experts estimate that around 4.5 billion websites exist on the internet and over 500,000 are made every day! From the get-go, stats are not in the favour of new online launches. Does this mean you are doomed to fail unless you are a multinational with hundreds of thousands of dollars for ad budgets?
Not necessarily – the internet can level the playing field for you with SEO and PPC. But how do you know which approach is the right one for you? By the time you finish reading this quick piece, you would have a fair idea.
Costs and Budget
Your online strategy is contingent upon the efforts you are willing to put in, and that depends on the budget you can allocate. Businesses that are struggling with leads and conversions prefer PPC because it provides quicker results. It can increase the cash flow because you can expect customers as soon as the ads show up online.
If your cash flow is steady and you can wait, SEO can be the better strategy. While it is a long-term approach, its effects are long-lasting as well. Usually, it takes between 3-12 months for the results from SEO to fully reveal themselves. However, that gets overshadowed by the inexpensive cost of customer acquisition.
PPC gives you an instant boost in revenues with the downside of higher customer acquisition costs.
Buyer Journey Analysis
What stage of the sales funnel do you most struggle with? Do your customers abandon carts or is there an issue with brand awareness, to begin with?
Questions like these would help you understand where to focus your efforts. For instance, if you want to retarget old customers who probably bought from you but did not return, retargeting through paid display ads is the better way to go.
Organic SEO takes a more informative approach – customers looking for information end up visiting your website and entering your sales funnels. After cold leads are warmed up, you can expect sales.
It is necessary to deep-dive into your sales, marketing, and customer support systems to extract reports that give you data-backed insights.
Time Constraints
It is not easy to rank high in the list of keywords through organic SEO. It is also way more time-consuming than PPC. If you are short on time and need a jump start, opting for PPC is the clear choice because of its innate ability to generate leads quicker.
However, this does not translate into the inability of good old SEO strategies. In fact, they are ideal for small or medium businesses that thrive on local customers and do not have many adversaries. The leads they would get through these tactics would be much better quality and there is a higher chance of returning customers, without additional spending.
While there cannot be a unanimous agreement between marketers on the pros and cons of each model, there is a consensus about their suitability according to the nature of business and preferences.
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