At the start of 2019, it was reported that there were 1,518,207,412 websites on the internet. That’s a lot. Your site being visited more than that of the competition is what everyone wants.
More visitors to a website have a higher likelihood of conversion. That means more chance of your product or service being sold. Even if you’re not selling anything, getting traffic to your site is essential. Doing so makes it more attractive for those who wish to advertise.
The competition to stand out is intense. Luckily, we can do an assortment of things to make our site rank first after a search.
Digital Marketing
Any form of marketing made using an electronic device is known as digital marketing. Compared to traditional methods, digital marketing is more direct and effective. The ability to specifically target a demographic is much higher. You can do digital marketing or get an agency to do it for you with most things.
There are various types of digital marketing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-per-click (PPC) are two common forms. Let’s compare the two and see what they offer.
Do You Know SEO?
SEO (also known as organic traffic) is the practice of increasing the number of people on your website. There’s no point getting a million visitors to your car showroom site if none of them can drive. But as brainboxlabs.com states, it’s not just quantity but quality.
This form of digital marketing can appear to move at the pace of a relaxed turtle compared to others, but it’s cumulative in its approach. SEO is structured and content strong. The more content a website contains, the better. But it takes time to build up good content.
One significant benefit of SEO is that it’s relatively cost-effective. If you create your content, it’s technically free!
For testing purposes, SEO isn’t so great. Split testing is used when you have two-page versions and want to see which version works better. It can sometimes use repeated words, which are frowned upon.
SEO can also be unpredictable due to Google continually changing its algorithm (often without notice). What works one day might not work the next.
Quick Click Click
PPC is a form of advertising where you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. You get to control a lot of the parameters. How long do the ads get to run? Who it goes out to.
The process itself is simple. Create an ad targeting a specific group of people (i.e., focusing on their age or location) to see it. After they click on the ad, it takes them to a landing page. That’s it.
You only pay the number of times the ad had a response. It’s a great way to help control advertising spending.
An advantage of PPC is that it can be set up and implemented immediately. It’s usually a one-off process where the results are also immediate — allowing you to analyze them in real-time.
Split testing is much easier via this method as you tell which ad performed better simply by the number of clicks it received. People will only click if they are interested.
PPC is also a lot more predictable. For example, we can only show the ad for our fancy car showroom site to those who can drive. This way, when someone (who can go) visits our site, there’s more chance they will buy a fancy car from us.
And the Winner Is…
Here’s the catch. It’s you. Neither of them is.
For some reason, SEO and PPC are always pitched against each other. It’s not a case of deciding between the two but combining them.
Together they make a strong marketing strategy. You can start off using PPC to find out what works for you. Then use what you found out for your SEO part of your long-term digital marketing plan.
But no matter which of the many options, you must select at least one. You can have the most fantastic website in the world, but without traffic, it can get lonely.
