Organic Search vs PPC: Where is your money working harder?

So we all know that the greeting card companies invented Valentine’s Day to sell more cards and guilt us into showing our partners we care. But what about SEO & PPC? Were they invented by Google to bump up revenue?

It’d be easy to cynically believe it were, but the truth is that the Internet is crazy huge and navigating through all of the information out there requires a very clever road map.

So how big is the Internet?

To give you an idea of just how big and busy the Internet really is, every second approximately 6,000 tweets are posted to Twitter, and more than 40,000 Google queries are queried.

In September 2014 it was estimated that there were 1 billion websites, and this doesn’t include the “Deep Web” that search engines don’t index because it’s full of illegal content.  It’s also estimated that there are at least 4.66 billion web pages online as of mid-March 2016, which is a huge amount of keywords when you think about.

The roadmap, the navigator and the destination

You can think of the search engine as the roadmap, the keywords as the navigator and the website as the final destination. In order to sort through the billions of pages that comprise the Internet, you need to know where you’re going – and you need a guide to get you there.

That’s where keywords come into play to help you navigate around the stuff that isn’t relevant and take you to the right destination quickly.

But how much do you really want to pay your guide?

And here’s the crux of the issue: you want people to come to your website over another, but there’s a few different avenues your driver can take: SEO or PPC.

A recent study by Enquisite, a web analytics company who focus on search data, showed that organic search results generated 8.5 times more clicks than a paid search result (8.5 clicks for every 1 click from a paid search result).

According to this article on MOZ, Organic Search has 1/8^th the spend of PPC, which is easier for Paid Search Agencies to value meaning they place more spend in PPC to get the same traffic. It’s almost the difference between taking an Uber and taking a Limo – if they’re both going to get you to the same destination, do you really want to pay a premium?

More: Maximising Your Marketing Strategy: The Importance of Repurposing Content

We’d love to talk to you about new ways of seeing the World Wide Web. Contact us today to see how your business could rank organically.