Currently, around 60% of UK digital marketers use search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques, and 65% use some form of paid search to boost their visibility and reach people online. The biggest difference between paid search and SEO is where their results appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). At its most basic level, paid search more readily allows you to unlock visibility on the SERPs by bidding on keywords, while SEO means you have to ‘earn’ the ranking.
Both channels offer great potential for furthering your brand’s online success. In this blog, we’ll unpack the allure, considerations, and overall characteristics of SEO and paid search to help you make a more informed decision about increasing your brand’s reach online.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a multi-pronged approach that focuses on optimising websites and online content to improve your visibility in SERPs. It includes keyword research, content optimisation, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.
Overall, SEO has some of the highest conversion and ROI rates online, making it an attractive option for brands that want a reliable, long-term strategy that consistently helps them hit essential marketing KPIs.
The higher your web pages rank on search engines like Google, the more likely people are to perceive your business as trustworthy. With a strong SEO strategy, your site can rise up the rankings to positions of greater visibility, fostering trust and credibility with your audience members.
Tracking the performance of an SEO strategy can be achieved using several metrics to gauge success.
Using SEO analytics tools, you can track the progression of key KPIs, such as organic traffic increase, click-through rate, increase in keyword cluster rankings and organic conversions.
Search engines are so popular because they offer specific solutions to a problem. And a solid organic search result is likely to be clicked on by users who are already at least half engaged with the topic on your webpage.
SEO plays the long game, and results cannot be guaranteed overnight. Search engines like Google take time to index and map out your site’s content, which means it can sometimes be a bit of a waiting game for your content to rank more prominently on SERPs.
Search engines constantly adjust, update, and improve their algorithms to produce more accurate results—and that’s great. However, this means you need to continually update your SEO strategy and campaigns accordingly.
Due to the expertise, resources, and time required to execute a successful strategy, SEO can be a costly, ongoing process. Additionally, it’s highly competitive, so it requires continuous updates and long-term work to stay ahead, which can significantly increase investment over time.
Just remember that while SEO is a long game strategy, it will take the pressure off your paid search budget over time. As your SEO performance improves, you’ll reduce your spend on PPC, so the time investment will pay back dividends.
The crux of paid search is that you pay a search engine to display your ads in the SERPs for target keywords. The most common form of paid search is pay-per-click (PPC), due to its quick results. This type of paid advertising serves your text-based ad at the top or bottom of search results based on certain keywords. You can bid on these keywords, and you’ll be charged a fee if and only if a user clicks on your ad.
Done correctly, paid search can offer rapid online visibility and accurate content targeting, but by its very nature, it can limit the sustainability of your long-term growth.
Paid search can offer instant visibility for your website or products. While it’s more involved than paying to play nowadays, selecting the right keywords, assigning a sufficient budget, and developing a decent landing page will give you the chance to get found relatively quickly. This can be attractive to start-ups or more established businesses with a new product, servic,e or proposition.
Paid search accommodates more accurate targeting, allowing your site or products to reach highly specific audiences and increasing your chances of conversion.
For niche businesses, using paid search can be a great way to connect the services or products on offer with a targeted pool of people who are more likely to be seeking them out online.
The traffic that paid search generates is scalable with budget, up to the point of maximising your impression share, i.e., being eligible to appear all the time for the searches you want to appear for.
Many consumers experience ad fatigue when faced with the same messaging and/or visual ads on a loop. This may even negatively impact their perception of your brand. Without an appropriate remarketing and frequency, paid ads can become repetitive and lose their impact.
Companies with more modest budgets may find themselves priced out of the bidding game, as they struggle to compete with other businesses for the best or most effective paid ad positions. In competitive sectors, aggressive bidding from others is likely to increase your average cost per click (CPC) and reduce how many people you can drive to your website for a given budget.
Click fraud occurs when malware or rivals click on paid ads to drain your funds without generating actual sales or conversions. This can become frustrating and expensive, especially for smaller businesses, though there are decent measures in place to detect and compensate for spending on ads where a click was generated fraudulently.
The difference between SEO and PPC is that PPC gets your brand in front of potential customers instantly, but you pay for every click, making it best for quick wins and scalable acquisition.. Yet, SEO takes longer to gain traction, but once your site ranks, you can enjoy ongoing visibility without paying for each visitor, as well as the added benefit that most SEO tactics also help you appear within.
If you’re a business owner trying to figure out whether to put your marketing budget into SEO or paid search, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common questions we hear, and the honest answer is: it depends.
Both have their place, but which one’s right for you comes down to your goals, your budget, and how quickly you need results. Let’s break it down.
h3: What you want to achieve
Think about your end goal.
SEO’s more of an upfront investment. You’re putting budget into optimising your site, creating content, and earning links, but you’re not paying for every single click. Over time, it works out cheaper per lead.
Paid search works on a pay-per-click model. You can control spending daily, but the minute you turn the ads off, the traffic stops. And in competitive industries, like UK law or financial services, those clicks can be £10, £20, even £50+ each.
This one’s simple:
If your industry is stacked with big players dominating the organic results, think major retailers or big-name estate agents, PPC can help you muscle into the conversation while you build your organic presence.
On the flip side, if your cost per click in Google Ads is sky-high (looking at you, UK conveyancing solicitors), then SEO can be a better long-term play.
We believe that organic and paid search can be deployed as separate but complementary channels to help you achieve the best results. In tandem, they create a flexible and holistic marketing strategy that considers visibility in the short and long term
The smartest approach? A hybrid strategy.
Buying habits have changed, resulting in more complex marketing funnels. Successful brands and businesses nurture prospects throughout the marketing funnel, so a combination of paid, owned, and earned media is likely to capture someone’s attention and keep their engagement until such a time that they want to enquire, make a purchase, or tell their friends about you.
Ready to get your brand seen? Chat to our team of organic and paid search experts to see what we can do for you!