Wonderkindz
SEO v/s PPC – Who wins?

SEO v/s PPC – Who wins?

by wonderkindz

Posted on March 15, 2017 at 03:36 AM

Gone are the days when the first step after launching your business was getting the visiting cards printed or listing yourself in the yellow pages. Today, the golden rule stands as ‘Build a website & then launch a business. If you don’t want your credibility to take a dent, make sure your website is up & running!’ If you expect people to throng your website as soon as you are live and give you a grand reception with 1,00,000 clicks from the very first day, your optimism may be taking you a bit too far! It all comes down to your visibility on search engines (read Google!) as far as the traffic is concerned. But this isn’t as simple as it looks. There is no ‘I agree’check box that you can click and your website would go on the first page on Google search results. There are specific ways by which you can increase the visibility of your website, viz. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click). And this is where the dilemma begins!

Believe it or not, even if you pay Google for your visibility, you can’t be certain that you would definitely end up fetching traffic! This comes under Pay Per Click (PPC). To take up the PPC approach, you essentially need to create a Google Ad word account and set your advertising budget. This account would let you handle your payments (that you pay to Google), the keywords that you wish your website to appear against and other related options. Whenever you do a Google search, apart from the links on the main page, you would also notice some links on the right side of the page which would come under the heading ‘Ads’. If you subscribe to PPC, this is where your link would appear. Here is an attached screenshot of a Google search for ‘furniture online’. The PPC listings have been encircled here.

If this ‘paid’ method doesn’t seem great to you and you wish to take the natural route to enhance your visibility, then you are in for a long run. The natural top rankings on Google can be achieved through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Imagine this -As a teacher, Google has asked its students (customers) to remain compliant to certain requirements in order to achieve good grades (visibility). The following are Google’s standard requirements for rating a website in its search results –

• Optimum keywords (keyword stuffing can go against you! Beware!)
• Number of inbound links to your website
• The overall content of the website
• The older the domain (not website), the more it is liked by Google

However, even if you remain compliant to all these requirements; it may take quite a few months for your website to reach the top end of the search result page. This is because Google changes its search algorithm quite frequently and two different algorithms won’t always give the same top search results. For the same reason, companies hire experienced SEO experts who can make minute changes in the website to match Google’s search algorithm.

Who’s the winner then?
As mentioned, it would be impractical to expect regular visitors from day one without using any of these techniques. As far as the SEO is concerned, unless someone specifically searches for your name or a similar kind of shop in your area, there is a negligible chance that your website would come up in the results. So it would be advised to start with PPC to let the people know that you have arrived and it the backend, work on your SEO because that is how you would ensure a long haul visibility.