What is the difference between Pay Per Click and SEO?

Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimisation are the two most common methods of search engine marketing. Both have the ultimate aim of increasing your website traffic and getting your website as high up on the search results page as possible. But what are the differences between these two methods? As a PPC and SEO executive, I will outline the basic differences between these two SEM methods!

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO marketing is the process of optimising your website as much as possible for search engines such as Google both on-page and off-page. On-page optimisation includes general web design best practices, such as having a responsive website which can be accessed by any type of device or having a fast load speed. Other optimisations are to help search engines understand the content of your website, such as the usage of keywords and alt tags of images.

Search engines will use on-page optimisations to understand what your webpage and website as a whole is about and show these pages to users who search for relevant terms.

Off-page optimisation is the most important and hardest part of SEO marketing. Off-page optimisation is essentially getting backlinks to your website or webpage from powerful and relevant domains. These backlinks will tell search engines that your content is relevant and useful to people. Backlinks are the most powerful indicator used by search engines to rank your website.

Search Engine Optimisation is generally a slow and long process. On-page optimisation is very easy and the quickest part, but it is also the weakest indicator. To really see some results, it takes a lot of time and effort gathering powerful backlinks from relevant websites.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click marketing is the adverts you see at the top and bottom of the search results page. As you can guess by the name, advertisers are charged when these adverts are clicked. The placement of adverts depends on a range of factors, including budget, expected click-through-rate, keyword relevance, landing page experience and others (as much as Google tries to hide it, the budget is the biggest factor!)

A well-crafted Pay Per Click campaign can instantly get your website to the top of the search results page for the keywords you want to rank for. This is why many people choose PPC: you don’t have to create any content and results are instant. However, as soon as you stop your campaign your ads stop showing, simple. Whereas in Search Engine Optimisation marketing, if you stop optimising your website or links then your website isn’t going to suddenly drop off the internet: you’ll still be ranking comfortably without having to do a lot of work.

How can Blue Whale Media help?

Blue Whale Media have an expert marketing team and have helped many clients in the past with professional pay per click and search engine optimisation campaigns. Unsure about which marketing would work best for you? Give us a call on 01925 552050 and we can suggest which one would suit your business, with a free quote!

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