• Friday, March 29, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

Should Nigerian businesses focus on SEO or Pay-Per-Click advertising?

businessday-icon

The question of whether companies should focus on PPC or SEO is one of the most popular questions I get asked when I teach digital marketing classes. or when I consult for businesses.

There is no easy answer to the question of which of these tactics to focus on. But I’ll address it as best I can.

PPC gets its name from its element where the advertiser only pays if a web user clicks on their ad. it’s fast, measurable and if done right one of the most effective ways of getting new customers for a business online.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a relatively cost-effective way to get your brand noticed very quickly online with measurable and scalable results.

SEO on the other hand is a slow-burn process and requires a major investment of “time”. very simply put, it’s doing a lot of work and creating optimized content to rank on the first page of google and get free clicks from potential customers when they search for related products/services.

“SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines,” according to Moz.

What I personally love about SEO is its versatility. First, while PPC is often limited to very specific keywords depending on the strategy and budget of a client, organic results from your SEO drive can be targeted to diverse keywords as clicks are free after the initial investment of time & resources.

More so,unpaid ads generally get more clicks as they don’t rely on budgets.

This is not to say SEO is the best. First of all, it will take months (possibly years) to get to the top of search results, get consistent high-quality traffic and ROI. Competition is also fierce for some keywords. Not to mention how a simple flick in the algorithm of some search engines can drop the rankings of some companies overnight.

One of the companies I consulted for in early 2015 began to notice a drop in their traffic when the CEO called me on the phone railing like a Marine drill sergeant: “Our SEO is broken. We are no longer on the first page of Google. What is going on?” When we looked under the hood, it turned out the Google Panda update had undone all our SEO efforts or was it the Hummingbird update ? or the Penguin update. You get the point.

All the resources & time we spent building SEO was thrown right out.

Although we regained the top spot in another two months, it goes to show how vulnerable we are to the whims of search engines like Google.

PPC provides immediate results at a premium and SEO provides credibility with a potential for everything to be undone on a whim.

 What then?

The easy answer to the question is that companies should combine both. But in marketing, gambling doesn’t work. It takes intentional and scientific combination of marketing tools to get any worthwhile results.

And that’s what stands out the great digital marketer from the mediocre. Their ability to read a company’s audience, the company’s objective, their industry and so many other factors and recommend the right mixture of PPC and SEO.

There are those who believe companies should never direct ad spend to PPC. I am certainly not one of those, as I believe in having a bit of control rather than ceding all control to the whims of Google updates.