The vast universe of digital marketing offers you great opportunities to grow your health center in the long run. Within this vast universe, you have many beneficial tools at your disposal to help you achieve that goal. Two of the most significant tools in your proverbial digital marketing toolbelt are SEO (search engine optimization) and paid ads (also known as pay-per-click). Both strategies are valuable in helping your center gain traction and thrive, but there has been a growing SEO vs paid ads debate. Which approach is best?
This article will help you gain insight into the whole PPC vs SEO discussion. Hopefully, the information provided will help you gain clarity into which approach may be more beneficial to the growth of your center.
What is SEO?
Before we dive into the whole SEO vs paid ads discussion, let’s dive deeper into each digital marketing tool.
The first tool we will talk about is SEO or search engine optimization. In simple terms, SEO is improving your website to increase its visibility on Google and other search engines. When your website is optimized for SEO, your website and its content will rank higher on search engine results, generating more views and foot traffic to your website. With this increased traffic, you have unlimited potential in reaching new clients.
How is this done?
Strengthening your SEO is done through enriching your content by selecting keywords that people commonly use to search for products and services. This also includes designing a website that is easy to navigate, visually appealing, and provides people with the concise information they need to make decisions. Also, SEO includes adding links from other sites and influencers, which makes your center more desirable in the eyes of those in your target audience. Another useful tool in building SEO is the use of paid ads.
What are Paid Ads?
Paid ads—commonly known as pay-per-click ads, is a form of internet marketing where advertisers pay a fee every time one of their advertisements is clicked. With PPC, it can be seen as a way of buying visits to your site rather than building your site organically through SEO. Search engines are a perfect forum for PPC since they allow advertisers to display ads that are relevant to what people are searching for on the internet. Common advertising services used for PPC include Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
When ads appear on a search engine, there is an “auction” for the keyword in the search query. Ads that are of the highest quality and have the highest bid amounts will win the top spot in searches for that particular keyword. Advertisers who want to be part of these auctions use platforms such as Google Ads to set up their ads and determine where and when they appear.
Is PPC or SEO Better?
So, when building your website and brand, which is better in regards to SEO vs paid ads? In the paid search vs SEO battle, PPC wins if you need quick results and want to quickly home in on your target audience. PPC is also excellent for time-sensitive content and provides detailed analytics that can help create new ad campaigns. However, PPC is more costly and may only be beneficial for those with extensive digital marketing budgets.
SEO helps generate traffic over time and is less expensive to create and maintain. With SEO, you have the ability to build a sense of trust and credibility with your target audience and have a wider potential reach. However, SEO takes longer to produce results, and you have less control over performance. In short, the PPC vs SEO debate has no clear “better” option because both methods produce different results and should be used together in a comprehensive digital marketing strategy instead of one or the other.
Why is it Important That Paid Ads and SEO are Both Used in Digital Marketing?
Ideally, you can use both tools in concert with each other to produce the meaningful results you desire for your center. With more people using smartphones and similar devices, PPC is valuable in driving traffic to your website, even if it already has excellent SEO. Utilizing both SEO and PPC will help you create a stronger and more cohesive marketing strategy since people tend to be more loyal to their needs at the moment than brand loyalty. PPC can help drive people to your site.
If your center needs professional guidance in choosing the right balance of PPC and SEO, contact MGMT Digital today. Our experienced and dedicated team will work with you in creating a dynamic digital marketing plan utilizing these two powerful tools. Contact us today to set up an initial evaluation of your center’s digital marketing needs.