SEO or PPC?

When a new client comes to Base One wanting to increase their position in search engine results, there are two options:

pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

vs.

search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO means optimising a client's website so that search engines can bring it to the top of their organic results page when potential customers type in relevant queries. These results are known as organic results because the engines find them naturally - there is no money exchanged between sites and engines (stay tuned for PPC below!).

The Base One SEO assessment typically includes analysing a client site for visitors' usability, reviewing the types of links the client site holds, altering the site's infrastructure to make it more search engine-friendly, and other top secret techniques.

Pay-Per Click on the other hand, is just that - clients paying for every click their site receives. You probably recognize the neat little 95-character boxes from these advertisers, which turn up on the right side of the search results; these are called paid results. 

When trying to reach top placement in paid results, there are two key components. First is the "bid" and second is the client site's quality (engines do not give away exact %'s on which factor is more important). A client bids on keywords relevant to their website's products, competing against other sites bidding on the same keyword; whoever has the higher bid and better quality site is placed at the top of the page. Base One works hard to build a strategic, well-coordinated PPC campaign so all relevant keywords are covered within each client's budget. 

Each method, PPC and SEO, has its drawbacks. In PPC, if you bid high enough, a brand-new or poorly constructed site can be placed at the top of the PPC results, but this will mean high costs and will be expensive to maintain. SEO is a slower beast, needing time to be register in search engines as a worthy and relevant piece of content that deserves to be at the top of the results pages. But in the end, it's virtually free.

Plus, users are more likely to refer to the organic results on a page, so clients have a greater chance of being clicked on by ranking higher in organic results. SEO improvements can also improve a PPC campaign's quality score so that clients don't have to bid as high; instead they can rely on their site's quality score to put them at the top of the paid results page.

Ultimately, both tactics deserve space in a client's search plan. To immediately increase traffic a PPC campaign can be a great catalyst, during which time implementing SEO tactics can improve the organic listings of a client's site. Eventually, depending on the competitiveness of the industry, PPC can form less of the equation.