What’s the difference between true SEO services and PPC advertising?

If you feel disappointed and still don’t know what would be better for your website or blog – either true SEO services or Pay-per-Click advertising – than you’re finally in the right place. As below I’m going to quickly outline the difference between these two standard solutions, which are both aimed at giving you better exposure and prominence in the relevant list of Google’s SERPs (a.k.a. a Search Engine Result Page, which is displayed in response to a given keyword-based query filled in by the live user). So, before anything else, let’s quickly outline these two concepts by their basic definitions.

True SEO Services vs. PPC Advertising

Taken in general, the Search Engine Optimization is commonly known as a non-commercial method aimed at pulling more visitors to your website or blog – driving the users directly from the organic list of the relevant SERPs by Google search engine. At the same time, however, PPC advertising stands for a paid scheme of online promotion by way of making your web page content appear prominently in a sponsored search section, with several relevant suggestions to be shown on the top of a given organic search listing, at the same time being displayed after them – closer to the bottom of the screen. That’s it.

That way, I can say that each of these two methods of effective online promotion – both Pay-Per-Click advertising and true organic SEO services – are falling into the general means of the Search Engine Marketing (otherwise, SEM). This broad concept is mainly related to all Digital Marketing practices, which are targeted at online businesses themselves, and the live users potentially searching for what their websites or supportive blog pages can actually offer to the Internet community. 

PPC online promotion can be compared with a traditional good old advertising strategy designed in accordance with mainly short-term objectives you have with your business in the foreseeable future. Put simply, you will get exactly what you’re actually paying for – given that you have a certain cash amount allocated for that, you will be able to determine when, where and in what way your paid advertisements are to be represented in front of your potential customers. In other words, you will be free to specify a bid amount for your target keywords and potentially winning long-tail search phrases (otherwise, CPC - cost per click) to gain a lot of online visibility – apparently, as long as you’re paying for that.

At the same time, however, true SEO services are focused mainly on driving organic search traffic – by way of building and adapting the whole web source to the needs of the target market audience. It means that organic search optimization is an ongoing process, which can’t be accomplished by simply sending a payment to Google itself, as PPC actually does. As for me, I would prefer “natural” search optimization for the following two reasons:

1. SEO is revolving mainly around quality content designed in accordance with the real intents and search needs of the live users.

2. When following all basic standards accepted by the major search engines (like Google itself), SEO has nothing about cheating or tricking – in fact, it’s all about creating a broad and long-lasting online presence for your online business website or blog. That’s it.