What Is The Difference Between Organic and Paid SEO?

Despite the enticing title, paid SEO isn’t really a thing, it’s called Pay Per Click, or PPC. You may also know it as Google Ads. So how does it work, and which is better for your business in terms of SEO?

What’s the difference between organic and paid SEO?

Organic SEO concentrates on building your website page rankings on search engines, with the goal of appearing on page one, and ideally in the top five results.

Paid search, or PPC, allows companies to bypass this and pay for the prime spot on page one by setting a daily budget instead.

So how exactly does organic SEO work?

Organic SEO relies on building a solid foundation for your website pages and moving your pages up through search engine rankings. Organic SEO takes time but is arguably the ‘cheapest’ option compared to PPC. Organic SEO is built by telling search engines what your website is about and answering your customer’s questions. This can be a service, product or blog. To do this, we research and find keywords that our customers use to find websites just like yours. We then add these keywords to your pages, URL, page title and meta description, as well as your image alt titles. Keywords are the building blocks of organic SEO, they act as a signpost to search engines and tell them what your website and content is about.

Next, we need to start to build authority. Website authority is another signal to search engines that your website is relevant and trustworthy. We do this by building backlinks. Backlinks are links that are incoming from other websites. Ideally, you want your backlinks to come from websites and blog posts that are relevant to you; PR opportunities are ideal for this as not only will the article be relevant but your ideal client or customer will be reading it. If you are a local business, you will want to build on your local citation links, these work particularly well for service and tradespeople and help build your authority for local SEO searches. It’s best to avoid backlink building services, these tend to be spammy and appear on low-grade, irrelevant sites and can do more harm than good for organic SEO. In a nutshell: 10,000 bad quality links won’t do a thing for your SEO, but one high-quality link will so pick your backlinks wisely.

We’ve all heard that content is King, and that’s still true for SEO in 2021, Google loves high-quality, rich content so get writing, and if you can’t write then find someone who can. New websites are built every second, and Google doesn’t give a jot about yours, unless you tell the Big G to care, which we do by building ourselves as experts in our field. By providing new content not only do we tell search engines that our websites are live, but we are also telling them we really know our customers and industry. That’s not only good for our ranking but also good for winning new clients.

How does PPC work?

PPC is the fast track to the top of search pages, but it comes at a price. PPC works in a similar way to organic SEO, in that we use keywords that our customers are looking for, and writes ads that appear when that keyword is searched for. Each keyword has a bid cost assigned to it, and the more highly searched for it is, the higher the bid. You pay per click on your ad, and once your budget for the day has been reached, your ad will disappear till the daily budget is renewed.

So which is best?

Like all marketing, it completely depends on your business and your budget. We know organic SEO takes time, but organic SEO is considered to be evergreen content, in that we mean it never disappears (unless you manually remove your pages from search engines, or adopt black hat techniques and get penalised). Organic SEO also means your listing won’t disappear from page one, unlike an ad. Organic listings can also be considered to be more ‘trustworthy’ by searchers, as many don’t like to be sold too and prefer to shop around to find the perfect fit.

Paid ads work well for highly competitive industries, such as trade services or eCommerce websites, where organic SEO can take longer to rank for. If you are paying for ad space, it’s recommended that you also invest in your organic SEO, so you can start to reduce your ad spend over time.

If you’d like to chat about your SEO needs, you can pop me a message or take a look at my services.