SEO and PPC are both three simple letters put together. Pretty easy, right? Well these two terms are major parts in digital marketing. Let’s take a look at each one and explain what they are.
SEO
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” Is is the process of gaining traffic from the “free” or “organic” listings on search engines. Many of these search engines we all came to know and love are Google, Bing and Yahoo. This is where web pages and websites are shown and ranked by how the search engines see the relevancy to people searching. So how can SEO help my business and where does it come into play you might ask? As each search engine varies as how they rank web pages, there are many similarities as well. There are specific factors that they look for in websites such as keywords, content and links that tell search engines “hey this web page has good content that can help what people are searching for.”
So SEO comes into play by utilizing, what is to be considered best practices, white hat SEO. Though I won’t get into full detail on all the factors that you should place within you website (because this blog will become a novel), using white hat SEO will help you rank high and in the end hopefully lead to more success. Understand in the crazy world of SEO, everything evolves and changes. Make sure you understand SEO and the basics around it.
PPC
PPC stands for “pay per click.” It’s pretty self explanatory on what it is. This is the other side of search engines that can also be called paid ads. I like to tell people it’s like a magazine ad or billboard ad but instead it’s on search engines. This is where advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Rather than attempting to gain ranks organically with SEO, it’s a way of buying traffic to your site. Marketers are able to bid for ad placements to help them gain higher positions on Google results page. A lot goes into a PPC campaign from researching and selecting the best keywords to organization of campaigns to landing pages. It can become very beneficial to businesses if used correctly.
Like SEO, pay per click is dynamic in everything that revolves around it. If you are looking into beginning PPC for your website, make sure you learn the ins and outs of it before diving in.
