SEO vs PPC-the differences
PPC, or Pay Per Click, is the second aspect of search engines you need to know about. It is closely allied to SEO in some ways, in that both are interested in ranking on the first page of results, and both use keywords to drive this traffic.
The difference is as the name suggests—Pay Per Click means you have to pay every time someone clicks on the ad you are running.
The good news is, you can get a lot of traffic really fast with this method. The bad news is you can also lose a lot of cash really fast with PPC.
The plus side is that you can test marketing messages really quickly by running an ad in front of a few hundred people in a matter of days to see if you have a winner. You can test and track every aspect of the campaign if you set it up correctly. This is far more efficient in terms of time and cost than anything you could achieve with a print-based marketing campaign.
The plus side is also that SEO and PPC reinforce each other. In other words, if people see the ads on the side, they might be a bit reluctant to click, but if they see both a high placement for the PPC ad, and one for the SERP, they are 70% more likely to click and even take action (either give their email address, or actually buy something).
But let’s be realistic about this here and now. Online advertising and marketing budgets have also soared since PPC was first started by Google in about 2000. Relative to these, the investment required for getting traffic through search engines is much lower.
However, as search engines have billions of pages indexed in English alone, let alone any other language, it is important to have a proper approach to using SEO effectively.
