The larger goal for SEO and PPC campaigns is the same – To gain search engine visibility, get targeted traffic and thereby business enquiries or online sales. A well managed SEO or a well managed PPC campaign have the potential of achieving these said goals.
Whenever we talk or discuss about organic rankings we discuss about how the search engines are improving their algorithms for churning out quality results as per the ranking factors which mainly revolve around the content and other quality factors of the website.
When we discuss about PPC campaigns,conversations and discussions get focused on the bid amount and how the search engines are working on reducing the click fraud rate. This basic difference itself tells us that PPC is pure advertising but SEO is about getting ranked for quality results.
A SEO campaign helps you:
- To establish an online brand
- Have a good online reputation
- Gain maximum visibility all over the web
- Helps you work on the website to making it more rich in content and error free HTML
- Solve Cannonical Issues
- Eliminate Duplicate Content
- Add more meaning to the images of your website
- Work on many other technical aspects of the website like HTTP headers, 404 pages, 301 redirects etc.
The SEO efforts put on a website continue to pass on the benefit of all the footprints created by the SEO campaign even if you stop working on the SEO after say about 1 – 2 years but, the PPC benefit gets terminated when you stop paying for the listing. Though there are situations when PPC can give the immediate return needed but SEO is something that cannot be ignored by any business owner having long term goals and plans for tapping the online market and establishing and online presence in the long run.
SEO has the same objectives like the other online marketing campaigns but in addition SEO also helps the website owner to establish an online brand by reaching out all over the web for making a presence of the site being optimized via social media, local directories, other topical sites and communities where the site can get links and have a platform to speak out the company ideas, values and goals.
Moreover, SEO relates to optimization for all the search engines not Google alone. Hence, any good SEO campaign will focus on all the search engines which have their own index and try to get maximum visibility on them. We know that Google is synonymous to search and has the maximum market share but you never know which search engine might just get bigger and bigger and start being used for search. For example Bing is gradually gaining popularity though at a very slow pace .
A genuine SEO campaign does not only help the website owner to get the high SERPs for the targeted keywords but also contributes in helping the search engines deliver quality and relevant search results.
The search engines time and again offer webmaster guidelines, tools and other help forums to help the SEOs with the search results. The following link tells us Google wants the SEOs to follow certain ethical guidelines in order help in the quality search results as an SEO campaign also has the ethical factor woven into its functionality.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
Hence, if your SEO campaign is a genuine SEO campaign rather than only a Google Optimization programme then you sort of future proof your search engine organic presence.On the other hand paid listings and other marketing campaigns give you a very short lived visibility for your site.
