"PPC or SEO? I Only Have Budget for One—Which Should I Pick?" - Pros, Cons and Final Answer - PUNCHUP | Growth, Digital Marketing, Consultancy & Training

SMEs and Startups face tough decisions every single day, probably more than bigger and more established companies, as budgets for Marketing (and everything else) are usually small and the resources in-house tend to be maxed out. This means that a wrong choice in terms of where to invest can have a direct impact in the companies overall results and projections for the upcoming months or years, much more than it would in a bigger company.

When it comes to Marketing, particularly Digital Marketing, no strategy in this day and age will ignore these two: Pay-per-click campaigns (PPC) or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

They are both extremely important weapons that can directly generate growth, for any kind of business, in any industry, so the right thing to do is to always work on both simultaneously, SEO + PPC (among other channels of course, like Email Marketing), as they not only generate direct results individually but each of them also boosts the performance and results the other channel can get. We will talk about later.

However, running a business or a Marketing department can be tough and sometimes there’s only a very limited budget to invest and it might be necessary to pick only one of these channels.

So the question is: which one to pick?

Understanding PPC and SEO

Just to make sure we set the baseline, let’s go quickly through the definition of both of these marketing channels.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or Paid Media:

PPC is an online advertising model where you pay a fee each time one of your ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site rather than earning them organically.

Google Ads is the most common PPC platform, but there are others like Microsoft Advertising (Bing Ads), Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Amazon Ads, TikTok Ads and more.

Also, although we commonly call PPC to all advertising run through these platforms, they also offer the possibility of paying for impressions, for video views, for conversions, for sales and even set to pay to achieve a certain ROI. It all depends on your campaign setup and your goals.

Depending on your strategy, PPC is usually associated with immediate results and generating (some) return from the very first days and very first money invested, which makes it appealing when compared to other channels.

In terms of formats of the ads, these can come literally in all shapes and sizes, from standard text ads appearing on search results pages, to static display ads, animations, videos, interactive experiences, lead forms, and more, the limit is your creativity (and the resources you have to produce or not more complex stuff).

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation):

SEO is the process of optimising your website to rank higher in organic search engine results. It involves a combination of on-page SEO (like content creation and meta tags), off-page SEO (like backlinks), and technical SEO (like site speed and mobile-friendliness).

There are hundreds of ranking factors and literally every single aspect of your website can have an impact. Most of these factors are sort of “kept secret” by search engines so companies don’t try to cheat the system. And if they do, it’s very likely they’ll get punished and see their rankings drop.

Most businesses (and some SEOrs) will consider that optimising for Google is all that matters as the search engine gets around 90% of the search engine market, however, other search engines like Bing by Microsoft still generate billions of pageviews, usually offering less competition.

Also worth mentioning other popular search engines like DuckDuckGo, popular for its advanced privacy and safety features; Yandex, popular search engine in Russia; and Baidu, the most popular search engine in China.

Lastly, important to mention that SEO has became wider in the past decade with platforms like Youtube and TikTok being used as the first place people go to find something or get answers to anything they want to know, so a lot of work can also be put to improve organic rankings on those channels

"(...) the right thing to do is to always work on both simultaneously, SEO + PPC (...), as they not only generate direct results individually but each of them also boosts the performance and results the other channel can get."

- key takeway -

Pros and Cons of PPC and SEO

To make an educated decision, we need to balance the pros and cons of each channel. The final decision will always depend very much on your specific context and objectives but some things are generic enough to apply to all cases.

PPC Pros:

“Immediate” results:
- With PPC, you can (kind of) start seeing results as soon as your ads go live. It will very much depend on your strategy, budget and the way you set up your campaigns but given that everything is configured that way, you can start getting visitors to your website and your landing pages from the very first minutes.
  
  However, clicks or website visits don’t necessarily lead to sales, so other factors come into play like how engaging and convincing your website is to generate a conversion. Consider some Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) audit before investing in ads.

Targeting options:
- PPC allows for ultra precise targeting based on keywords, demographics, location, interests, user behaviour and more.
  You can get very very specific on who you want to target and also in what stage of the funnel are they. For example with Google Search ads you can target people that already actively searching for your products or services, closer to be ready to buy, by targeting the keywords they’d type to find such products or services. On the other hand, via Display or Video ads, you can capture them to the Awareness stage, where you present your brand to an audience that might be the perfect customer but are still not aware of your products.
  
  In addition to that, you can also create Remarketing campaigns, targeting people that already visited your website or interacted with your brand before, which can make them more likely to convert.

Measurable ROI:
- It’s easy to track your ad performance and return on investment (ROI) with PPC, but it requires good conversion tracking and analytics setup.
  When all is correctly tracked you can understand exactly how much each click, each ad, each keyword, each audience, each location, etc, generates in sales, allowing you to make data-backed decisions on where to allocate more or less of your investment.
  
  It is also important, however, to have in mind the indirect impact of running ads, as sometimes you might not be able to directly attribute the sales to any of your ads, but just the fact that you are reaching out to a wider audience, and the increased awareness generated from that, can then lead to users visiting via organic or direct traffic, which might not necessarily be seen on your analytics tools as a sale coming from ads.

PPC Cons:

Cost:
- Costs can add up pretty quickly, especially in competitive industries. Back in the days you’d probably get away with clicks on Google Search costing something like 50p but now, it won’t be that unusual to see companies bidding more than £50 to get a simple click, one click, that might not even lead to anything.
  Although some platforms like Meta or TikTok still allow you to generate “cheap” clicks, it is quite hard not to get crushed by bigger players in pay-to-play channel, where it’s very hard to get some serious results with a small budget.
  
  However, it is definitely not impossible and there is room and opportunities for everyone, all that’s needed is a good strategy, particularly in terms of targeting, where the more niche and the more specific, the better, increasing chances of conversion and likely paying less to compete than when targeting more generic audiences.

Competition:
- As mentioned in the previous point, in some industries competition can be very agressive, with clicks costing dozens of pounds and big players spending thousands a day, making it harder to gain any good traction with a small budget.
  There are always strategies to try to find your way to attract the right audience but having a limited budget will also not allow you to perform much A/B testing and understand what can work or not.

Temporary:
- In simple terms, once you stop paying for ads, the traffic stops, and you might have thrown a significant amount of money that if it did not generate a return yet, it probably won’t in the future either.
- However, as mentioned already, there is always an indirect impact of running ads, as these will generate awareness with a wider audience that might remember the brand and purchase later in time and also, as it generates visits to the website, ads can also positively impact SEO, since some metrics like page views, engagement and time on page are said to also be within the search engine ranking factors.

Depends on website effectiveness:
- Truth is, you might have excellent ad campaigns, the most amazing and engaging ads, and the most spot-on targeting, if your website is not good enough to convert users into leads or sales, you will be just wasting your money by paying for clicks to lead users there.
  Before investing any money in ads, make sure you thoroughly test and review your website to make sure it’s well built, the UX is good and the content is structured to lead the visitors to take an action.
  
  When in doubt, we always recommend getting a professional to perform a CRO audit on your website, identifying all the potential blockers and any quick wins that can be changed to lead to better conversion rate.

"Before investing any money in ads, make sure you thoroughly test and review your website to make sure it's well built, the UX is good and the content is structured to lead the visitors to take an action."

- key takeway -

SEO Pros

Long-Term Results:
- SEO efforts compound over time, providing lasting benefits. Meaning that all effort put into it will keep contributing to better results as time passes and the more work you do, which does not happen with PPC.
  
  Particularly in terms of content creation, all the content produced and added to the website, when of good quality and relevant to the keywords you want to rank for, will “forever” contribute to increase your relevance in that topic in specific, but also for the more general terms, products, services, etc that you promote, as it works alongside all the other content you’ve created and will keep creating to increase your authority and therefore be perceived as more relevant by Google or other search engines.

Cost-Effective:
- Although it requires investment, SEO tends to be more cost-effective in the long run.
  
  After assuring that technically speaking (performance, speed, security…) your website is optimised, SEO requires mostly time and capacity to keep creating relevant content, which can be done internally, for free.
  
  This makes it also less risky than investing in PPC, as with ads money can “disappear” quite quickly without generating any results and SEO all the work done stays with you and can deliver results in the future.
  
  If you want to learn more about this part, have a read through our #SEOtoScale series, namely the article about doing good SEO with small budgets.
Credibility:
- Organic search results are often viewed as more credible by users. In fact, there’s even a phenomenon often discussed between digital marketers we can call “selective blindness”, when the user is so used to having ads appearing in the first results of Google pages and on the side bars of websites that the eyes and the brain almost instinctively skip those and focus only on what it know is a organic/non-paid result or piece of content.
  
  Appearing as a top organic result, tells the user that your website is genuinely relevant for what they’re searching and you’re not appearing simply because you paid more than everyone else.
  
  Also, it’s the feeling that users will find what they search for and what they want to find, and not what others want to show to them.
  
  Appearing on the first results of search engines for the most relevant keywords is one of the biggest assets a business can have and can really represent a gamechanger compared to not appearing at all or appearing anywhere past page 2.

SEO Cons:

Slow Results:
- SEO can take months before you see significant improvements (or any improvements at all). It really is game of patience and sometimes, especially small businesses, there is no time to afford waiting and waiting for SEO to deliver results as sales need to increase ASAP.
  It might require a lot of optimisation and content created around a particular topic to start seeing any uplift at all in search results impressions for those specific keywords, let alone to start generating any clicks, as if you’re not on the top 10 results, the chances of getting a click are much less than 1%.
  
  (One advice: make sure you correctly set up and develop a good understanding of how to analyse Google Search Console. It can be your strongest ally to improve your SEO results)

Complexity:
- SEO is multifaceted and requires ongoing efforts and expertise that can be quite complicated for the average Marketing team of a SME or Startup.
  As previously mentioned, there are hundreds of ranking factors (+200 so they say), a lot of them known only by the search engine developers themselves, which can make SEO quite a frustrating game to play. You might be doing all the right stuff and the needle is not moving at all.
  
  Of course trusting an experienced SEO professional will much more likely get you in the right path to sooner or later start seeing results but even then, nothing is guaranteed and, even if you improve from being on page 50 of search results to being on page 3, (which would normally require a tremendous amount of effort, btw) that might not make any difference at all in terms of website visits and results for the business.

Everyone else is doing it:
- Much like with PPC, the competition is strong, and it gets stronger every day.
  The problem is simple to explain: if you have 1000 businesses in your industry, and let’s say 200 of those are implementing all SEO best practices and doing all the good things exactly by the book, at the end of the day, only 10 of them can appear in the first page of Google results.
  
  Now, of course you can always focus on being more niche, on focusing only in specific regions or very particular use cases, which will reduce the number of direct competitors, but will also reduce the potential search volume you can capture.
  
  One other very important advice: never trust any “SEO professional” who promises that they can put your business ranking on the first page of Google organically. That is just not possible to guarantee, by anyone as there are way too many factors that we can’t control.

Appearing on the first results (...) is one of the biggest assets a business can have, (...) a game-changer compared to not appearing at all or appearing anywhere past page 2.

- key takeway -

So how to choose? Key considerations

Now that you know all the main things to know about SEO vs PPC and before you decide which one is the best for you right now (if you ever have to choose between the two of course) here’s a few things you have to consider.

(And just to make it extra clear, we don’t suggest you pick one and abandoned other as ideally you want to have both channels running, alongside other things such as Social Media, Email Marketing, etc.)

1. Your Business Goals:
  - If you need immediate traffic and leads, PPC might be the way to go.
  - If you’re looking to build a sustainable, long-term online presence, SEO is likely the better investment.
2. Budget:
  - PPC can be expensive, especially for competitive keywords. Ensure you have a budget that can sustain ongoing campaigns and sustain a learning period of at least 1 month, without getting any return.
  - SEO requires an initial investment and continuous effort but can be more cost-effective over time.
3. Industry Competition:
  - Highly competitive industries can make both PPC and SEO challenging and costly. Consider your competition and strategise accordingly.
  - For both of them, going very niche is the best approach when your budget is small and you’re trying to find your space
4. Target Audience:
  - PPC allows very precise targeting, which can be crucial if your target audience is well-defined and specific. It also allows remarketing, which can be a more cost-efficient source of sales.
  - SEO builds broader visibility, reaching users actively searching for relevant information. You can make your content very specific for a certain audience but it might still be seen by anyone and everyone

Case Scenarios

As we now have all the information we need to make a decision, let’s start wrapping up into actual decisions on when’s best to go for PPC or SEO, based on your context and what you want to achieve.

When to Choose PPC:	When to Choose SEO:
Launching a New Product or Service: If you need to generate buzz and traffic quickly.	Brand Building: When looking to establish long-term credibility and trust.
Seasonal Promotions: Ideal for driving traffic during specific periods or events.	Content-Driven Strategies: When content marketing is a significant part of your strategy.
Highly Competitive Niches: Where organic ranking is tough to achieve quickly (or ever).	Tight Budgets: If you have a limited budget but are willing to invest time in ongoing efforts.

Final answer (our opinion !)
Okay okay, enough of going in circles, we need to decide. I only have budget for one, which one should I pick: PPC or SEO?

Our team’s opinion is: go with PPC.

Why do we think this way?
We mentioned enough times already that both are important but if you have a small budget it would be a bigger mistake to spread it so thin that you won’t accomplish anything in any channel.

If you focus your existing budget on PPC (assuming that is managed by a professional that know what they’re doing) you have the chance to immediately start targeting potential customers and getting some results, and some return from it, which can then fuel your marketing budget to keep investing and keep growing.

If you go all-in on SEO first, we fear that it might take too many months of work (and investment, even if smaller) to start getting any tangible results, meaning qualified visits converting into clients.

PPC can also be a good way to get insights and quality data on your audiences, knowing more about their interests and what they engage with, which can help you in the future to create relevant content and keep expanding and optimising your website based on actual data.

In any case, whatever route you pick, make sure you go with a trustworthy professional, avoid cutting corners and avoid people that promise you magical results: it is not that simple.

Even the best and most well paid SEOrs and PPCers in the world will struggle sometimes and that’s only normal.

Lastly, you’ll also have to trust the process and accept that you can’t expect to always see amazing results, immediately and have to give it some time.

Conclusion

Both PPC and SEO have their merits and can contribute significantly to your digital marketing strategy. The choice between them depends on your immediate needs, budget, industry, and long-term goals. For immediate results and precise targeting, PPC is the go-to. For sustainable growth and long-term credibility, SEO is the smarter investment.

Ultimately, a balanced approach, incorporating both PPC and SEO, often yields the best results. However, if you must choose one, carefully consider the factors outlined above to make an informed decision that aligns with your business objectives.

If you’re still in doubts, give us a shout, and don’t forget to check our specialised trainings on PPC, SEO and much more.

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“PPC or SEO? I Only Have Budget for One—Which Should I Pick?” – Pros, Cons and Final Answer