What’s the difference between SEO vs PPC?

By Grayson Carter

In this week's #FAQFriday video we discuss the differences between SEO vs PPC advertising.

Are you using either in your business?

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<<—-SEO vs. PPC Transcript—>

What's up guys? This is Grayson from Leadcadence.com. Welcome to another episode of Frequently Asked Questions Friday. In this week's episode, we're going to be answering the question “

What's the difference between SEO and PPC?”


SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and PPC is short for Pay Per Click advertising or Google AdWords, which is one of the main pay per click advertising platforms available.

We're going to go over some of the differences here and these are key distinctions that a lot of people jumble together.

Making sure that you understand the difference between the two will help frame the question of which one should I be using in my business and which one should I invest in first if I have to make a decision between the two?

The first thing that distinguishes the two are the free versus paid.

Search engine optimization, if somebody clicks on your listing in the search results, you don't pay anything; however, I put quotes around it because in order to get your site to show up in the search results, it's probably going to take some work.

You have to have a good site structure, you have to have good content, you have to have lots of links. That doesn't just happen naturally.

It's free when somebody clicks on it, but there may be a lot of work and expense that goes into getting all those things in place so that it does rank organically.


Pay per click, just like the name says, is a paid service.

You have to pay each time somebody clicks on the ad. That can be great because you only pay when somebody clicks.

You don't pay to have your ad show up, but it definitely is a paid service.

There is a cost to it. The next difference is that search engine optimization is slow to change.

You can do a lot of work, maybe publish content, build links, but your site may not see a significant jump in the search engines right away.

Whereas, with pay per click, if we set up a campaign and as soon as it's approved by Google, which sometimes can be as quick as a couple minutes or a few hours, we can start running that immediately.


If we want to push out a new product, a new service, if we want to bring some more clients into the business, we can get pay per click up and running almost immediately and start seeing the results from that campaign.


The next thing is what kind of influence is the performance of each of these different products?

Search engine optimization, the big three things that I see as influencing how your site ranks are structure. How well is your code written on your website? Is it laid out in a search engine friendly fashion?

Can the robots crawl your site?

All the technical aspects of it. Is that really sound? The next thing is content. Do you have valuable content that the visitors coming to your site are going to find valuable?

The more that the visitors find your content valuable, the more Google's going to rank your site higher in the search engines.

The last thing is links. The more people that link to your site, the more authoritative Google sees you and, again, the better you're going to rank.

All of these things don't matter at all for pay per click advertising. The three main things that Google looks at as where to share your ad in the search results are the ad's click through rate.

If you have a higher click through rate, it's going to be more likely to show up. How good is the landing page that the ad takes you to?

How well does it match the searcher's intent? How well does it match the ad?

Does it have all of the best practices in place? How much are you paying? These two things matter a lot, but if you're not paying enough, you're not going to show up.

The bid amount is also important.
The next thing is that search engine optimization is very unpredictable.

If you paid at all attention to some of the updates that have come out with Panda, Hummingbird, Caffeine, the new mobile update where your site has to be mobile responsive to show up in the mobile search results. It's always changing.

We're never quite sure exactly how the different changes are going to impact a website. Google gives us a pretty good framework, but there's still a lot of aspects that we don't completely know.

I would say it's not completely unpredictable, but it's pretty unpredictable.


Pay per click on the other end is very predictable. Because we're able to track from the ad to the landing page, to the website, to the call, we're able to track the complete process from beginning to end and know where we're doing well and where we're losing customers. It's a very math-based system.

We know how much we pay, we know how many people click, we know how many calls we get. It's a very predictable process.


The next thing is that SEO is cumulative and, on the other hand, pay per click is not. What does that mean?

Let's say you write a dozen blog posts and you put them on your website. Each of those blog posts may be able to bring in customers to your business and as long as those blog posts are on your website, that may be enough work that you've put in to constantly bring a flow of traffic.

You do the work once and you get to reap the benefits for a long time.

However, pay per click, if you stop paying, your ad stops showing up. You don't get any benefit from being on there a long time. If you stop paying for the ads, your ad stops showing up.


I put “however' because if you start doing retargeting, which is part of the pay per click advertising platform, you build up a list of people that you can market to. It's a little bit more cumulative because over time that retargeting list builds up and so you're able to market to more and more people.

There's a little bit of accumulation that happens when you've been marketing on the Google AdWords platform for a long time.


The last thing is that SEO is hard to split test. If you want to try something out.

If you're not sure should I do A or should I do B, it takes a long time to get enough data to figure out which decision is the best. Pay per click, on the other hand, you're practically required to split test.

In any good ad account, there's going to be multiple ads per ad group. Knowing which one is going to do the best, you only know that after split testing.

Running multiple ads, running multiple campaigns, and seeing which ones provide the best results are the only way to get a great performing pay per click campaign going.


That's the break down of search engine optimization versus pay per click.

If you had only one to invest in, I would lean toward starting with pay per click advertising. Why do I say that? Mainly because you can start immediately. Once you throw up a campaign and you start getting some results coming in, you start seeing the sort of ads that people are clicking on, the key words that are driving the most traffic, then you're able to take those results and start applying it toward your SEO campaigns.

The key words that you think may be converting customers may not be the key words that are actually bringing people in and turning into buying customers.


Starting a pay per click, you can start very quickly. It's very predictable and you can start getting results right away. Once you have a better idea of what you should be optimizing for, then you can start throwing it into an SEO campaign and trying to rank organically so you can get a little more free traffic.


That's the difference between search engine optimization.

There's a lot more nuances between the two, but that gives you a pretty good overview. If you like this video, if you got anything out of it, share it with your friends, hit the like button below.

Let me know what you think. That's all for now. We'll see you next week.

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