You are not alone if you are having a hard time getting the word out about your brand new business venture. Many business entrepreneurs, like you, struggle to get customers in the beginning. It is hard to balance the expense, management, and results of a marketing campaign. The approach is usually one of two marketing strategies: search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. But, which strategy is best for your startup in 2022?

You can use a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to get to the top of search engines, or you can use search engine optimization to develop a more natural search engine marketing plan (SEO).

Is there a right / wrong answer? Is it possible that it’s both? Before making a decision, you should be aware of the benefits and drawbacks of both SEO and PPC.

PPC Pros for Startups

• PRO: It produces results quickly (when done correctly!)

One of the most appealing aspects of PPC is the promise of instant results for everyone with a budget. “PPC allows you to be at the top of Google page one as long as you pay for it,” says KAU Media Group, a renowned PPC agency. “It’s an amazing and efficient technique to generate a high ROI.” But it isn’t magic. Spend money on data. Numbers do not lie. Cutting corners and taking shortcuts ultimately costs more.”

When your bids are set to outrank your competitors, your company will appear at the top of the SERPs where your target market searches for businesses like yours, resulting in an immediate increase in traffic to your website and, perhaps, an increase in conversions.

One of the most difficult aspects of running a business is that no one knows who you are, and it will take some time to create quality, organic traffic. By creating a PPC campaign, you will be able to effectively avoid this issue from the start.

• PRO: It will deliver qualified traffic while organic traffic rises.

Another significant advantage of PPC is that it excels at exactly what SEO is supposed to do: getting your brand in front of the right people. A properly managed PPC campaign will result in an immediate increase in traffic from qualified prospects – people who have already made the first step by looking for a business in your market on Google.

As previously stated, attracting a steady flow of organic traffic in the early stages of your business is too difficult, and while your brand’s reputation develops, a smart PPC campaign can help you alot until your SEO efforts begin to bear fruit.

• PRO: You can compete with more established brands.

When you’re a startup entrepreneur, knowing the massive imbalance between your resources and the industry giants can be frustrating. Obviously, if you’re just starting a consumer tech company, you’ll have a long way to go before you can compete with Apple’s marketing strategies.

However, with a well-planned approach to PPC, you’ll be able to capture some of the market shares that the big companies aren’t paying attention to. For example, if your company is a footwear firm, a large, international brand may have a monopoly on the fundamental keyword “shoes,” but long-tail phrases like “sustainable formal shoes” may be left wide open for you to target.

Even for the most competitive, high-volume keywords, targeting them at specific times of day or with additional qualifiers might help your new business carve out a surprisingly significant share of the search market!

PPC Cons for Startups

• CON: It can be costly, notably in highly competitive markets.

One of the most frequent reasons for companies delaying PPC is the budget required to see any meaningful returns. Paid search accounts for a substantial portion of most organizations’ marketing budgets, and this is unlikely to change very soon.

Because of the huge intrinsic value of PPC marketing, companies with vast resources would naturally acquire the greater share of visibility and clicks for the most valuable keywords, leaving startups with few alternatives for expansion.

As previously said, there are always solutions. However, in some industries and sectors, the scale and scope of the resources held by large corporate competitors can imply that PPC isn’t a wise investment until your brand has a solid foundation.

• CON: The possibility of low intent traffic.

Though some firms can have excellent success with their PPC right from the beginning, it is by no means guaranteed, especially in newer, developing areas such as AI solutions for specialised applications.

Getting strong results from PPC ads will be a gradual process for many firms, involving running relatively under-funded and unsuccessful campaigns, then analyzing them to extract lessons that may be used to improve future campaigns.

If your resources are already limited, you might not be able to afford such a slow-moving phase characterized by low-intent traffic. Before launching a paid search campaign, thoroughly research the basics of paid search in your business.

SEO Pros for Startups

• PRO: It generates high-quality leads.

While PPC leads aren’t always the most valuable, SEO is excellent at gaining attention from those who are already looking for a company like yours.

Google has dominated the search engine business by building an algorithm that is excellent at delivering the desired results. SEO strategies are increasingly prioritizing user engagement metrics, which implies that the more you personalize your site to the needs of your audience, the higher you’ll rank in search engine results pages.

SEO is effective at bringing useful, qualified leads to your site, from basic, technical actions like increasing site speed and deploying user-friendly navigation to publishing high-quality and valuable content dedicated to a particular subsection of your target audience.

• PRO: It enhances your site’s navigation and usability.

Taking on from this, SEO will not only help you to rank higher on a given search results page, but it will also make sure that when visitors land on your site, they will have a far more positive experience, driving word-of-mouth marketing and building brand loyalty.

Previously, anyone who could build a few spammy links and stuff a page with keywords might reach the top of a SERP. Google has gone a long way since then, and in 2022, businesses must create a site that not only has a large number of keywords and high-quality backlinks, but also gives an overall enhancing customer experience that will keep customers using Google as their primary search engine.

• PRO: It ensures long-term, sustainable growth.

Though SEO takes longer to get started when compared to PPC, but it is also a long-term marketing option which will not be taken out from you. Search is a vital part of the modern customer journey in any industry, and this will only get worse as time goes on.

Taking care of all the contents, links, and maintenance needed to get a site to the top of Google’s search results will take time, but once there, it will take an equal amount of time for a competitor to drag you down again.

Furthermore, while the search volume for specific PPC keywords might vary greatly from week to week, as long as you stick to Google’s concept of giving value to the end-user, SEO provides a consistent path to long-term growth.

Benefits Of Combining Both SEO & PPC

PPC is too costly, while SEO is too slow, according to widely held competing views.

When these two teams work together, you’ll be rewarded with amazing insights, learnings, and outcomes that neither one could achieve on its own.

These streams are not supposed to be standalone, and aligning them is one of the most underrated methods to boost your entire digital marketing productivity.

Benefits Of Combining Both SEO & PPC are:-

1. Using SEO and PPC together can result in more consistent ranking.

Though SEO takes longer to get started when compared to PPC, but it is also a long-term marketing option which will not be taken out from you. Search is a vital part of the modern customer journey in any industry, and this will only get worse as time goes on.

PPC can be used in combination with SEO to retain page rank while an SEO strategy is optimized to the new updates to mitigate any potential loss of rank caused by these changes.

2. Double Your Visibility

One of the major benefits of operating both Google Ads campaigns and an SEO plan is the ability to appear multiple times on the search results page. This will increase your site’s visibility on a page, giving you more customer attention.

A site owner who appears in the top three organic ranks may conclude that PPC advertising is not worth considering. What he/she should keep in mind is that the first few results on a results page are paid ads. That is, the user may see your site displayed twice, once in the top 6 or on the first page.

3. Increased Click Through and Site Traffic

Another greater advantage of taking a combined approach is that it will increase the click throughs & website traffic, giving them both a paid result and an organic result for increased visibility. This is especially helpful for those challenging long-tail keywords where your organic position fluctuates.

4. Big Pool Of Data To Analyze

Another significant benefit of combining SEO and PPC is that it expands the pool of data available to you, providing you with deeper insight into how users behave when searching for businesses like yours. Your PPC analytics can inform your SEO work and vice versa, resulting in an overall improved search marketing productivity.

5. PPC Ad Copy Performance Can Support Organic Content Planning

As with keyword testing via PPC, it might be beneficial to determine which of your ads are performing well and resulting in the highest conversions in terms of ad copy. Using PPC examples, you may design title tags, meta descriptions, and on-page content based on these to try to achieve similar click-through performance with your organic listings.

PPC campaigns allow you to test the success of ad copy and keywords more quickly. PPC testing is useful because of the immediate results that can be noticed. You’ll be able to quickly determine whether ads are effective, but testing titles and meta data through SEO tweaks may take longer.

Conclusion

Overall, having an integrated strategy to digital marketing by combining SEO and PPC efforts gives you various benefits. By focusing on a particular location or platform, you reduce your overall potential for visibility, traffic, and conversions. PPC and SEO, while quite different, can truly complement and increase one another’s performance to assist bring extra online results.

We hope that this SEO and PPC guide has helped you to make the right decisions while developing your startup marketing strategy. Check out our blogs and tutorials on website for further help.