PPC Vs Organic

PPC vs organic marketing; how do they differ? With PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing, you pay to receive a click on your advert. Pay per click can be turned on almost instantly too, using several online marketing platforms (Adwords, Facebook etc.).

Organic marketing uses SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to attract the attention of search queries on Google and other search engines. For organic marketing to work properly you’ll need to attain a ranking for your content. When content ranks highly on the first page of Google, you can expect free organic traffic according to the keywords in your content.

A high ranking for a competitive keyword is quite difficult to obtain. But to rank for longer tail keywords is more achievable. Bloggers use SEO and target longer tail keywords in their content to give them more chance of ranking and getting free traffic.

PPC Vs Organic – How Long?

To get a pay per click marketing campaign running only takes a few minutes to set up. It can be working within a few days if not a few hours. Google Adwords lets you target specific keywords relevant to your business. You can set up an advert which only shows when your keywords and demographics are triggered by a suitable search. So for example if you have a local DIY store, you can set an advert to trigger when someone in your local area searches for “DIY store”.

Here’s the results for a local search for DIY store in Leeds, UK. You can see there’s 210 monthly searches for this term in Leeds, UK. If you set up your advert to trigger only on relevant terms, you won’t waste advertising budget on irrelevant searches similar to your target market persona/target audience.

So paid advertising can start bringing in customers almost immediately. Organic marketing takes much longer. It can take several weeks or months before your website/blog posts appear on the search engines. They may never appear if you’re competing in a very busy niche too. This can make organic marketing a much slower (and potentially more risky) option, even though it’s cheaper.

Pros & Cons – PPC Vs Organic Marketing

Still, there’s a lot to be said for organic marketing. Once you have established an organic presence online it means you’ve got free traffic. Often people will find organic content online in preference to the paid adverts, preferring organic content because it’s more trust worthy. With a paid advert, you know someone set up an advert with no investment in content building. Since it can take considerably more effort in order to attract an audience organically, that content becomes worth more in the eyes of those seeking trustworthy information.

Organic content which can be ranked on Google tends to be that with longer tail keywords, too. With short tail keyword phrases, it’s incredibly competitive on the top of the first page on Google. So it’s much harder to rank. Instead of aiming for those terms, find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Long tail keywords tend to be more specific which means they are more targeted too. This is useful for businesses who want to attract targeted customers who know what they want to buy.

Long Tail Keywords In Organic Content

An example of a short tail keyword search might be “buy camera”. Here’s an example of what comes up for this particular search. As you can see the first result is a paid advert (PPC).

However, if a customer knows more specifically what they want, it’s much easier to create content which ranks for that longer tail keyword phrase. Plus, you know you’re more likely to make the sale too, since “buy camera” isn’t very specific. But this keyword search is:

Here’s the organic search result underneath all the paid adverts:

So if you sell cameras, it’s definitely a good idea to create pages on your website which relate to long tail specific searches which your shop provides. Long tail keywords are much more specific than shorter tail ones and this is great for organic marketers who create a lot of content. Not only are they better off with ranking such terms on Google, but the terms themselves are more likely to lead to sales than their shorter tail counterparts.

PPC Vs Organic

Despite organic marketing taking much longer to perform than pay per click marketing, it gives you back an exponential return over the longer term. Initially though, with a small amount of content it can be difficult to realise organic’s effectiveness. Over time if you build a content marketing strategy into your marketing plan, it can pay off with free traffic for years from the content you’ve already created.

As your volume of useful content grows, your website authority will build. You’ll gain more backlinks, likes and shares which gives Google a positive social signal. Content can also be manually shared throughout social media to build your social reach. This effort has a compounding effect which over time builds on itself. Older posts can bring in customers years after they have been created. Content ultimately compounds to give you free traffic which increase year upon year.

PPC VS Organic Traffic

Of course this all takes time and effort. Content doesn’t build itself. You can of course outsource this work if you don’t want to do it yourself. But ultimately content marketing should be a part of your marketing strategy for the above reasons. Once you start getting free traffic, it will save you a heap of money you would otherwise be spending constantly on PPC.

Pay per click comes with its own problems too of course. Each PPC advert you run doesn’t automatically bring in customers and 10X your marketing budget, no! It would be nice if it did. Rather, you’ll likely spend some budget learning how to run adverts in the first place.

Adwords, and other platforms can be tricky, with multiple settings, menus and tick boxes. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be easy to burn through a budget and target the wrong country! Or place your adverts in front of the wrong audience! So it’s worth treading carefully when you start out with an advertising campaign.

Summary

The good thing about PPC is you can test and measure almost instantly, using your marketing budget wisely to find an advertising campaign which consistently brings in new customers. Ideally, you want to spend less in advertising than you receive in profit.

A positive return on investment with a pay per click advert is the goal. Once you find this (and this doesn’t happen automatically), you can leave it running permanently and it should bring in the customers. You can increase your budget (with a positive ROI) and scale up incrementally.

This just can’t be done with organic marketing. Organics on the other had works as a “slow burn”. Over time, your organic marketing strategy can bring in customers absolutely for free. Although you can’t control your traffic as easily with organic marketing, results can grow exponentially once you hit a certain volume of content and it starts to rank on the search engines.