There are many ways of appearing on search engines, locally on their maps, within image, video and shopping results. The two most popular ways are through advertising and appearing in their organic listings. Here’s a quick demonstration (right):

The first 4 listings you see on the results page are paid for via Google’s AdWord platform, this is known as PPC. PPC or pay per click is essentially a bidding war between companies. In this example the first 4 companies will have either or a combination of the biggest bid, the best relevancy on their landing page or the best campaign results history. Those three elements are put into a formula and Google shows results based on the best one. Of course as always it’s a little more complex than that as you can choose many different ways to advertise and therefore be top for longer or later in the day, for broader search terms, the list is becoming endless. But the point is, if you pay you get to the top for keyword searches.

The bottom two results found on that page are known as organic results and these are Googles natural listings, here Google has taken a vast amount of information about your website and ranks you amongst your competitors for the keyword you are competing for. There are hundreds of factors that can alter a search engine ranking and they are ever changing so search engines can improve the quality of their output.

Let’s breakdown the major differences between the 2 disciplines:

Speed. We all want quick return on investment and orders to come flowing through. This is where AdWords wins. A well put together Adwords campaign can take just a few hours and traffic can instantly come to roost. Some of our clients here at Spirus compete in the Adwords platform and can turn on products or services instantly, with good results.

Return on investment. Depending on your method of search engine optimisation the return on investment could be much lower than that of PPC. Some industries spend £100k plus on Adwords yet a good search engine optimiser can be around £40k per year, or out sourced to an agency even less than this. Depending on the size of the site you may need more people and an agency becomes cheaper. Adword campaigns are one click costs, from 1p to anything up to £10 and beyond. In the examples we have seen and projects we have worked on, most traffic comes organically, not just from main keywords but long tail and expert answers. Therefore seo wins on value, hands down.

Expertise: If you are looking to help yourself digitally then AdWords maybe lightly phasing to begin with but you can soon get the hang of it and begin your own campaigns. SEO on the other hand is a somewhat complex beast with many signals to keep your eye on, combining techniques and software to get results. If you want it simple with a level of control then AdWords is for you.

Traffic: As you have seen in the example above, the top four results for “single ovens” show adverts, so surely paying to be top is the best? Whilst organically who ever goes into page 2 or 3 for their results, so what’s the point if you aren’t on page 1? Both questions we have heard here at Spirus. So yes Adwords takes you to the top, but consumers are a little more savvy these days, and know that the best answer, product or service may not be the first ad they see. Whilst yes it’s true visitor attention weakens after page 1, but not with everyone and if you don’t start somewhere you won’t end at the top. SEO in our experience yields more traffic for less money.

Control: AdWords gives you total control of the keywords you compete on and increasing budgets and per click amounts will increase traffic. SEO can bring up surprising results and it’s not as easy to control a website for set keywords. However, that’s not necessarily a disadvantage, long tail keywords are great for converting traffic as consumers maybe further down the buying cycle with certain questions.

Brand: Both disciplines help strengthen your brand, PPC can help ensure a consumer strengthen their belief in your brand, as much as the world has changed we still do trust what we see on TV and radio! However, seo can do this in a different way by becoming an expert voice in te field you can demonstrate your brands prowess in the field.
In summary, they are two separate tools that kind of do the same thing, both need to be used in a balanced digital strategy and we encourage our clients to test, test and test again when dealing with both disciplines.