Depending on the nature of your company, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) may contribute more to you achieving your overall business strategy as opposed to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising does. In this article, we take a closer look.

PPC vs SEO

Look at your budget first

New information released by the Small Business Institute states that there are a quarter of a million small, medium enterprises (SMMEs) in South Africa. These businesses make up 98.5% of the economy.  As SMMEs are usually quite small and have not been in business for very long, their budgets – particularly their marketing budgets – will not be very big. More often than not, they will not have a marketing budget at all.

A new website does not have a high domain authority and, as such, will not feature close to page one of the Search Engine Results (SERPs) pages. This is because the domain that they are working on is very young.

Factors such as building good quality internal and external links, keeping the content on your website fresh and up to date as well as ensuring that there are no bad links on your site will contribute to increasing your domain authority.

Using PPC will get your new site visible on the front page of the SERPs. So, when a user makes a query that contains one/all of the keyword(s) that you have allocated to your advert, your advert will be one of the first things that is the user sees when his/her results are displayed. Even if you only can afford a miniscule budget, allocated it to a PPC campaign. You will see the results.

Build up your SEO strategy

While your PPC campaign is in motion, work on implementing your SEO strategy. For example:

• Make sure that your on-site SEO is on point. Do not – under any circumstances – stuff the pages on your website full of keywords. The density of keywords on any particular page should be between 0.5% and 1.5%.
• Use H1, H2 and H3 tags to highlight main points in your article.
• Make sure that you include a good selection of long tail keywords in all articles/static pages on your site. These are easier to rank for.

It takes time for you to see the results of SEO on your website. However, this does not have to take years. The faster that you work, the more improvements that you make on your site and the better-quality articles that you publish will contribute to making you see the results of your SEO efforts that much faster.

Measure with Google Analytics

It is all very well and good to have a well-thought out and executed SEO strategy. However, if you cannot measure the results that it brings into your website you mind as well not have it at all.

Google Analytics is a free tool that you or your website developer will install on all the pages on your site in order to monitor traffic. You can access the reports on your laptop and even on your smart device via the Analytics App.

The amount of information that Google Analytics generates is incredible and will assist you greatly in all of your digital marketing efforts. However, what is most powerful for your SEO efforts is that you can see, via the Audience Acquisition Report, what keywords people are using to arrive at your site. This will show which keywords that you are using in your SEO strategy are working.

PPC definitely has its place in digital marketing. However, it is only as good as the time you keep your campaigns running. SEO, on the other hand, will outlive PPC as it is driven purely by user behaviour and organic results.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Do you want to learn more about how to optimise your website – as well as other sites – for SEO. If so, you need to do an SEO course. The Digital School of Marketing’s SEO and Web Analytics Course will give you all the tools you need to make this a reality. For more information, please visit our website.