Is SEO Or PPC Better For Your New Website?

If you have a new startup or you are launching a new website, your first inclination may be that you should to delve into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) immediately so that your website will rank high with search engines like Google and Bing in order to be seen by customers and leads. But we at eTraffic say, “Not so fast”—there are important things you need to consider about your business and goals, and the deep waters of SEO before you get started. Could there be a better option for you that can bring you instant results? Let’s take a look at:

·      Setup SEO vs. Ongoing SEO

·      The powerful benefits of PPC advertising

Not All SEO Is The Same—Startup SEO vs. Ongoing SEO

When you employ SEO methods to your website, your main goal is to have your website appear high in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). There are over 180 million active websites on the Internet, with multitudes of businesses competing for site visitors. A Nielson estimate finds that the average web user visits only 96 separate domains each month, so how can you get eyes and clicks on your website? SEO.

But not all SEO is created equal; SEO is factored into two major efforts: Setup SEO and Ongoing SEO.

Setup SEO is the essential and fundamental work applied to your website to make sure your business is seen and ranked by search engines so that you appear in the results when customers and leads need to find you. As the name implies, it is the initial SEO work you need to do when setting up your website. Setup SEO is minimal and it is an on-site process.

Driving traffic to your site by pushing keywords is the more extensive, on- and off-site process of executing Ongoing SEO. This type of SEO work takes resources that many businesses do not have upon launching their new website:

1. Time – SEO is an ongoing process, and its analysis and efforts and ongoing.
2. Money – SEO is not cheap. You may want to employ professionals in the field, and content creation (and even curation) costs in terms of paying writers, be they in-house or outsourced, and analysis tools.
3. Product Maturity – Startups undergo changes which affect SEO.
4. Resources – To manage content and to make technical changes.
5. Capability and Flexibility – To effectively respond to ranking algorithm changes which can occur frequently.
6. Commitment – SEO cannot be quickly changed.

If you don’t have all of the resources to get into Ongoing SEO, what can you do to increase your SERP ranking? The best answer for you is PPC.

PPC Offers More Benefits For New Websites

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a marketing channel which buys visits to your site instead of focusing on organic visits. PPC ads are the Sponsored Ads you see on a search engine’s results pages when you search for keywords (short-tail keywords which are more general; long-tail keywords which are more specific and are related to the point-of-decision in the buying cycle for a consumer). PPC is easier to employ, it is more cost-effective, and it delivers stronger results than Setup SEO.

Other benefits of PPC for new startups and new websites are:

1. Immediate results which are measurable.
2. No need for technical resources for your site maintenance.
3. No need for content that you must produce or curate.
4. PPC can literally be done with a few button clicks.
5. Product maturity is not needed, so you can begin right away.
6. You are in total control of your budget.

For new startups and websites, PPC is the perfect solution for getting and increasing site traffic. It is important for all sites to use Setup SEO because it is requisite, but for new sites on the web, PPC at your initial site launch proves to be the better tool for driving traffic over Ongoing SEO. With PPC, you will see spikes in your site visitor numbers immediately, you will learn how to refine organic keywords through your efforts, and you will be set up for successful Ongoing SEO in the future.

By all means, if you are very well financed and can engage in Ongoing SEO from the onset, do not be discouraged from doing so. But if you are like most new businesses that are starting out and have to parse resources, drive traffic to your website with PPC– the most effective digital marketing channel available to you.

Author: Yolanda M. Hairston, Content Manager, eTraffic