A lot of the time when we are talking to clients, we talk about organic search and PPC, but what are the main differences between these two approaches? It may sound like the answer is obvious, but you would be surprised at how many people don’t know the difference.

In simple terms, organic search is focused on optimising your website for Google so that it deems your content the most relevant to search queries in your niche. On the other hand, paid search is concerned with paying Google to get clicks through to your site.

If you really want to get traffic to your website, you should be looking at a joint SEO and PPC campaign. This way you will appear in both paid and organic search results.

Let’s go back to basics:

What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the term used to cover the tasks that we undertake to help your website be discovered by search engines so that it features you on its search engine results pages (SERPs). Google, and other search engines, take into account hundreds of different factors when it comes to ranking your website as a response to any query – and no one knows them all. However, we have a good idea about what some of them are, and these factors can be split into three main areas:

#1 On-Page SEO

On-page SEO relates to the tasks related to optimising web pages. Some of these tasks are:

  • Using short, descriptive URLs
  • Writing title tags and meta descriptions which encourage clicks
  • Making sure all images have descriptive alt tags
  • Including keywords in important places
  • Writing easy to read content which covers topics in-depth

#2 Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the tasks that we do of your website to help improve its ranking. Some of these tasks include:

  • Making sure your Google My Business (GMB) listing is optimised
  • Getting backlinks from authoritative websites which are relevant to your niche
  • Building citations and placing content in online directories

#3 Technical SEO

The third area of SEO we look at is technical SEO which is a series of tasks that help search engines to crawl your website, index your website and then rank your content more efficiently. The sort of tasks that come under this area include:

  • Using canonical tags to prevent duplicate content
  • Optimising robots.txt to improve crawl efficiency
  • No indexing thin content
  • Improving page speed

What is Paid Search?

Paid search tends to relate to Pay Per Click (PPC) where we pay the search engines, like Google, for clicks – it is a form of advertising.  Your content could appear at the top of bottom of SERPs, within the first few pages, and will have the word ‘AD’ next to it so that it is clearly identified as an advert which has been paid for.

Paid search is also known as pay-per-click because you only pay for your advert if someone clicks on it. This means it is a much more measurable marketing channel than more traditional forms of advertising, and also allows you to promote your business to an engaged audience, who are actively researching the products or services you sell in order to purchase them.

Which is best: Organic Search, Paid Search, or Both?

Most people’s understanding of SEO would mean that they would jump to the conclusion that using organic SEO is best as it is ‘free’, and it is consistent. However, this isn’t always the case – sometimes a focus on organic search is best, sometimes a focus on paid search is best and sometimes it is best to use both together.

Before we make any recommendations to clients, we take a good long look at their keywords to help us decide the best way for us to achieve maximum search engine visibility and traffic. For example, some keywords are so competitive that it can take years to rank for them. If you are up against some of the big boys such as Amazon, for example, you may be best taking a long-term view and using a mix of both paid and organic search to help your pages to start ranking.

This is where we come in. We know that both SEO and PPC are useful in different ways, and we have the knowledge and experience to decide when it is best to use each tactic to get you the results you desire.

Paid Search vs Organic Search: What’s the difference

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A lot of the time when we are talking to clients, we talk about organic search and PPC, but what are the main differences between these two approaches? It may sound like the answer is obvious, but you would be surprised at how many people don’t know the difference.

In simple terms, organic search is focused on optimising your website for Google so that it deems your content the most relevant to search queries in your niche. On the other hand, paid search is concerned with paying Google to get clicks through to your site.

If you really want to get traffic to your website, you should be looking at a joint SEO and PPC campaign. This way you will appear in both paid and organic search results.

Let’s go back to basics:

What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the term used to cover the tasks that we undertake to help your website be discovered by search engines so that it features you on its search engine results pages (SERPs). Google, and other search engines, take into account hundreds of different factors when it comes to ranking your website as a response to any query – and no one knows them all. However, we have a good idea about what some of them are, and these factors can be split into three main areas:

#1 On-Page SEO

On-page SEO relates to the tasks related to optimising web pages. Some of these tasks are:

  • Using short, descriptive URLs
  • Writing title tags and meta descriptions which encourage clicks
  • Making sure all images have descriptive alt tags
  • Including keywords in important places
  • Writing easy to read content which covers topics in-depth

#2 Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the tasks that we do of your website to help improve its ranking. Some of these tasks include:

  • Making sure your Google My Business (GMB) listing is optimised
  • Getting backlinks from authoritative websites which are relevant to your niche
  • Building citations and placing content in online directories

#3 Technical SEO

The third area of SEO we look at is technical SEO which is a series of tasks that help search engines to crawl your website, index your website and then rank your content more efficiently. The sort of tasks that come under this area include:

  • Using canonical tags to prevent duplicate content
  • Optimising robots.txt to improve crawl efficiency
  • No indexing thin content
  • Improving page speed

What is Paid Search?

Paid search tends to relate to Pay Per Click (PPC) where we pay the search engines, like Google, for clicks – it is a form of advertising.  Your content could appear at the top of bottom of SERPs, within the first few pages, and will have the word ‘AD’ next to it so that it is clearly identified as an advert which has been paid for.

Paid search is also known as pay-per-click because you only pay for your advert if someone clicks on it. This means it is a much more measurable marketing channel than more traditional forms of advertising, and also allows you to promote your business to an engaged audience, who are actively researching the products or services you sell in order to purchase them.

Which is best: Organic Search, Paid Search, or Both?

Most people’s understanding of SEO would mean that they would jump to the conclusion that using organic SEO is best as it is ‘free’, and it is consistent. However, this isn’t always the case – sometimes a focus on organic search is best, sometimes a focus on paid search is best and sometimes it is best to use both together.

Before we make any recommendations to clients, we take a good long look at their keywords to help us decide the best way for us to achieve maximum search engine visibility and traffic. For example, some keywords are so competitive that it can take years to rank for them. If you are up against some of the big boys such as Amazon, for example, you may be best taking a long-term view and using a mix of both paid and organic search to help your pages to start ranking.

This is where we come in. We know that both SEO and PPC are useful in different ways, and we have the knowledge and experience to decide when it is best to use each tactic to get you the results you desire.