comparison · SEO VS PPC
Two Ways ToGet Found.
One rents attention by the click and one builds pages you own. This lays both out plainly, so you can tell which one your next dollar belongs in and check the answer yourself.
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01 · seo vs ppc comparison
SEO and PPC compared.
| what you are comparing | SEO | Paid search |
|---|---|---|
| How fast it works | Weeks before anything moves, longer in a crowded category | The same day you turn it on |
| What happens when you stop | The pages keep earning and decay slowly | The traffic stops that afternoon |
| What a click costs | Nothing per click. The cost is the work that earned the page | You pay for every click, every time, indefinitely |
| Who you reach | Anyone who searches the term, on any day | The term, the city, the device and the hour you choose |
| What you control | Which pages exist and what they say | The headline, the offer and the page they land on |
| Where the money ends up | In pages and profiles you own | With Google, as media spend |
| How it fails quietly | Nobody tells you which pages were never written | Budget burns on terms that were never going to buy |
02 · the short answer
Which to run first, SEO or PPC.
Run paid search when the calendar has holes in it this month and you can keep funding the clicks. Run SEO when you want the traffic to keep arriving after you stop writing checks.
The test is your own calendar. If next month is the problem, paid search fills it faster than any other channel. If next year is the problem, SEO is the only one of the two that compounds.
03 · ease of use
How hard SEO and PPC are.
Paid search is easier to start and easier to waste. You can have it up in an afternoon, and it can spend a quarter of the budget on the wrong terms before anybody notices.
SEO is harder to start and harder to waste. Nothing happens on the first afternoon. What makes it hard is knowing which twenty pages out of two hundred are worth the work. That judgment is the whole job.
Getting started
Paid needs a budget, a term list, an ad and a page to land on. SEO needs a crawl of what you already have, then a decision about what to fix first.
Staying on top of it
Paid needs pruning every week or the wasted terms compound. SEO needs consistency more than attention, and it punishes long gaps rather than short ones.
Knowing whether it worked
Paid tells you within days, in clicks and cost per booking. SEO only makes sense if every change carries the date it shipped.
04 · design control
What you control in each channel.
With paid search you write the headline, the description and the page the click lands on. You control the entire first impression and you can change all of it before lunch.
With SEO you control the page. You do not control the words Google prints about it in the result, and you do not control which of your pages it shows. You can influence both, strongly, and dictate neither.
So if you have a specific offer that has to be said a specific way, paid search lets you say it. If you need to be the answer people find while they are still working out what they need, that is the page's job.
05 · seo
Where SEO wins.
SEO wins wherever the same search happens over and over for years. A dentist in Henderson does not need a fresh ad every quarter for people looking up what an implant costs. That page gets written once, gets kept current, and answers the question for as long as the practice is open.
06 · pricing
What SEO and PPC cost.
Paid search has two costs: the media budget that goes to Google, and the cost of somebody running it. SEO has one, the cost of the work.
Here that work is $1,000 a month per service line, three months, then month to month, no setup fee. SEO is one line, Paid Ads is another, and the two together are $1,799. Your ad budget stays yours, goes straight to Google, and I take no percentage of it.
What decides the real cost of paid search is how quickly somebody kills the terms that spend without buying. That is a weekly job, and the one most accounts are not getting.
07 · seo vs ppc which is better
Which channel to choose.
There is no better one. There is a better first one, and it depends on which problem you have.
Start with paid search if
The calendar has holes in it this month, the offer is clear, and you can fund the clicks for at least a full quarter. Paid buys you the time to build the slower thing.
Start with SEO if
The practice is stable, referrals still carry you, and the problem is that next year looks like this year. Start here too if you already pay for search and cannot trace one new client back to something that was done.
Run both if
You can fund the clicks without touching the money that pays for the pages. Paid tells you within weeks which terms actually convert, and that is the best list of pages to write next.
Fix the site first if
Traffic already arrives and nothing happens. Sending more people to a page that does not convert makes both channels look broken when the page is the problem.
08 · when neither is right
When search is not the problem.
Sometimes search is not the constraint. Three situations where spending on either channel is the wrong move.
First, when new enquiries already arrive and go to voicemail after five. The leak is at the front desk and no amount of traffic closes it. Second, when the offer is not competitive: if every practice within three miles sells the same thing at the same price, more visibility spreads the same problem wider. Third, when the site cannot take a booking on a phone.
09 · common questions
SEO and PPC questions.