Forget the SEO Vs PPC debate, both can work for your business

There’s a constant debate in search marketing that asks whether SEO or PPC is the best way to improve your search presence. Type “SEO vs PPC” into Google and you’ll be inundated with opinions from either camp, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
Which is fine, except we’ve fallen into this habit of asking the wrong question. SEO and PPC aren’t competitors and they both have a significant role to play in building your search presence.
Combine strengths for better results
SEO and PPC bring different strengths to the table, but they also come with their individual weaknesses. PPC costs you money, for example, while SEO requires an incredible amount of time, patience and resources to make it happen.
Combine the two and you’ll see something very different happen. PPC’s strengths make up for a number of SEO’s weaknesses – and vice versa – which leaves you with a much stronger overall strategy for search marketing.
 
Smaller businesses need to rethink their budgets
Something that will always put small business owners off PPC is the apparent cost involved. This is fair enough when you have a limited budget to work with – especially when SEO offers up a “free” alternative.
The trouble is you can only call SEO a free marketing strategy if you consider time completely worthless; because you have to invest a whole bunch of minutes, hours and years into a successful SEO strategy. Which is why it’s so important small businesses put an accurate value on time in their budgets, because it could make sense to pay up more now for quicker results.
 
A chance to jump the queue
In fact, if you have the budget to work with, the SEO and PPC combo is ideal for smaller businesses – especially in the early days. Organic SEO is a slow game and you’ll be hanging around to see results for quite some time. Even then, you can’t expect to knock the big names in your industry off the top spot, when they already have years of organic search ranking behind them.
Something you can do is invest in PPC to buy yourself a spot on page one of Google results, gain instant traffic and slowly build your organic SEO presence in the background. This gives you traffic from day one and a chance to build your customer base, while your long-term SEO strategy can be working its magic behind the scenes.
Her we have the biggest strength of PPC covering for the biggest drawback to SEO – PPC is quick and SEO is slow. Team them up and you get instant results with all the long-term benefits of organic search as it naturally grows. You should also see consistently better results from both PPC and SEO strategies, as your overall search presence grows, and you become a bigger online brand.
Just think of it as jumping the queue in the early days, until you have enough weight behind you to stand alone.