Pay-Per-Click vs Blog Writing for Business

Are you trying to decide how to get the most bang for your buck? Should you invest in an SEO blog writing service or PPC?

At Blog Writing Services UK, blogging, as you can probably guess is our main method for building our web presence and is the way we acquire organic and relevant traffic. On the other hand, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is another way of promoting online growth. 

In this article, we’ll go through the differences between PPC and blogging, the benefits of each, as well as their relative cost-effectiveness in relation to the resources you have available.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

What is pay per click?

It is what it says on the tin. The most commonly known example of PPC is Google Ads, like below. 

When an ad is created, advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically. 

To build on our google example earlier, search engine advertising is one of, if not the most popular form of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering. For example, if we bid on the keyword “PPC software,” our ad might show up in the very top spot on the Google results page. Most social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Quora have also adopted PPC as their primary business model. Next we’ll go through the pros and cons of PPC, and enable you to determine whether you want a further introduction to PPC.

So how can PPC help your business marketing strategy? 

1. PPC for fast-ish results

With PPC, you can head over to any ad platform and start a campaign right away. It will typically deliver results fast. Providing you have a well designed advert, you can count the minutes before a rush of visitors come cascading to your pages. This is because the moment your PPC campaign is approved (provided that your bids are high enough to merit priority placement), your ads will immediately be displayed in Google. 

The approval of ads can take a day or two, but following this, the traffic will almost be instantaneous. Hence, PPC works amazingly well with product launches, squeeze pages, CPA marketing and affiliate marketing involving high converting offers, joint venture (JV) projects, seasonal promotions, event-focused marketing, and analogous online business campaigns. Assuming you have a well crafted advert that gets clicks, the amount of visitors you attract is only really limited by your budget, if you only have a budget of £2.00 per day, and the average cost per click (CPC) is £1, you’re only going to be able to attract a maximum of 2 people per day. If you have a £200 budget, you’d have the scope to attract 200 people per day. While attracting traffic is important, you’ll need your pages optimised to convert this traffic into paying customers or subscribers in order to make your campaign financially sustainable.

2. PPC allows for granular targeting

PPC marketing will allow you to narrow down your prospects based on their demographic data. We have included a screenshot of Google’s campaign creation and as you can see it allows you to promote to the age range, gender, income bracket, education level, and even marital status of the people who will be able to view your ad.

Popular social media sites like Facebook also allow you to target people based on their hobbies. These make PPC a powerful way of reaching the narrow band of people your business needs and leading them to your web pages.

3. It enables you to focus on search results for your keyword category

PPC results are displayed above the organic search results. This prominent position means that in certain cases, as much as 50% of the search traffic goes to the top 3 sponsored links. Through allowing you to rank on specific keywords, it ensures that you’re there when your customers are looking for you, as opposed to more traditional marketing methods, where you reach out in hope of the customer wanting what you’re offering.

The disadvantages of pay per click advertising

1. It can be INSANELY expensive

If you’re in a competitive industry like insurance, PPC can get very expensive, very quickly.

Let’s work through an example of PPC advertising: 

DropBox experienced this firsthand in 2009. After experimenting with Google Ads, they quickly discovered that they were getting a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) of $233 — $388. The worst part: their product was only $99.

They were losing money running Google Ads.

With this in mind it’s important to understand that depending on your industry, pricing and other factors that it’s not always as black and white as just picking a marketing method and running with it. Those with smaller budgets need to be very tactical & focussed with their marketing, those with much bigger budgets can go with more of a broad sweeping approach.

2. It can lose effectiveness

While PPC is easy to implement and scale up, the longer campaigns run, typically the less effective they become. People start to see the ads too often. This is referred to as Ad Blindness. Ads have to be innovative and fresh to prevent them becoming stale and normalised. 

3. PCC requires optimisation 

If you’re new to PPC, like anything it can typically take a couple of iterations and some experimentation to get yourself on the right track. This coupled with the potentially high costs of PPC can mean that you may lose some money initially until you refine your PPC marketing strategy.

4. You’re renting your Google ranking with PPC

With PPC you’re only temporarily renting your space in the search engine results pages (SERPS), as soon as you stop paying, you lose that top spot.

This means you only gain traffic while you’re paying for it. In turn PPC is better suited as a short term investment, or as something to top up your organic traffic, rather than a long term endeavour like content marketing. With content marketing methods like blogging, you earn that top spot in Google, and those pages can potentially rank for years in the top spot, ensuring a steady stream of customers that you’re not having to pay for every time they click onto your page.

Blog Writing

What is Blogging? 

If you’re totally new to blogging it may first be worth asking what is a blog? In short it’s a regularly updated page or informational website that displays information in the format of posts, allowing individuals or businesses to share their views or information on a specific subject.

Like PPC, blogging also has an acronym we need to be aware of – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This basically means “knowing what Google likes and doing that.” So what does Google like? Well, Google likes websites that have plenty of content, but that content needs to be valuable to the people who would be reading it. 

SEO content marketing uses blogging as a vehicle to produce content that performs a function. The content could educate your target audience, create inspiring thought leadership or it may aim to solve a problem they’re searching for solutions for. There are tonnes of different ways you can develop content to provide value to users, and over time, you’re going to be using them all.

Moreover, Googlelikes regularly updated websites, as this tells it’s robots that you and your business are alive and well; blog posts provide an opportunity for you to show Google this is the case. What’s more blog posts get crawled and indexed faster than static pages, ensuring that you’re continually feeding the hungry machine that is Google.

So how can blog writing contribute to my content marketing strategy?

1. Blog writing and SEO content marketing create organic and consistent traffic 

As long as you can rank highly in Google for your desired keywords, you can generate consistent search traffic to your website.

It enables you to ensure traffic would continue to flow. Contrast that with other marketing channels. Paid marketing is like a tap. Turn on the tap and traffic will flow. But as soon as the tap is off (i.e. you run out of money), your traffic will dry up. But also, it is important that the traffic being generated is converting and you’re not just getting traffic for no real purpose. 

Likewise for social media. In today’s world, social media is a pay-to-play game. Refuse to pay and your engagement will likely drop.

This is why plenty of marketers consider SEO one of the best channels for long-term, scalable results.

2. Blogging and SEO is cheaper in the long-run

Ahrefs blog goes through a very comprehensive comparison. Their website ranks for over 120,000 keywords and gets an estimated 240,000+ search visitors a month.

If they were to buy that traffic through PPC, it’d cost an estimated $733,000 per month (or $8.8 million per year.) It’s reasonable to say that SEO is cheaper in the long run.

3. You can automate blog writing with a content marketing agency 

One of the cons of blogging is the process of writing blogs can be time-consuming. Furthermore, there is also the added complexity of consistent blogging, ensuring your blogs are written with appropriate keywords and that they are distributed in the correct communication channels to gain organic traffic. 

If you’re a start up or small business, your time is precious so carving out 3-4 hours on average for 1 blog post may not be the best use of your time. What’s more, if you’re a larger business, hiring an editorial team and those with the required skillsets to fill in all the pieces of the puzzle can be both lengthy and cost prohibitive.

However, with companies like Blog Writing Services UK, you can completely outsource and put your blog on auto-pilot.

What are the cons of Blogging? 

1. Blogging and SEO takes time to realise

Blogging is a slow burn. When you post your first blog post, you probably aren’t going to get any organic hits from it. For that matter, when you post your twentieth blog post, you still might not be getting many hits from it, and you might not have gotten a single conversion from it. Maybe you were lucky and it worked much faster, but maybe not.

On the other hand, blogging works like a snowball effect. A single blog post, or a small handful of them, isn’t going to have much impact on anything. As they build up, though, their impact becomes greater and greater. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where every new blog post is raking in the views and the conversions, because you’ve built up years worth of value behind them. What’s more this has an overarching impact on your website, helping all of your content and pages to rank better. This is a byproduct of good content getting backlinks from other sites, combined with other important ranking factors within Google’s algorithm such as your website being regularly updated (because it see’s you’re posting blogs regularly). All of this combined allows for long lasting positive results.

2. Blogging content requires valuable and authoritative content

If you want your blog to be effective, you have to create content that consistently provides value to your target audience. This can establish you as a thought leader, or subject matter expert. We’ve seen that when it comes to consuming, sharing and linking to content, people prefer to learn from subject matter experts. Therefore, to do well in search, you’ll likely need expertise.

If you’re the domain expert and have the time & resources to create the content yourself, go for it! If not, hire someone to create it for you.

3. Blogging can be time consuming

As we mentioned earlier, the process of writing and distributing blogs can be time-consuming. So if resources are limited in terms of availability of staff say in a start-up or small business, then carving out 3-4 hours per week for your weekly blog posts all year round adds up.

Our Take

Both of these strategies work towards a common goal and they can both contribute concurrently to increasing your domain authority (DA) and ultimately benefit your business. Blogging takes a while to kick in and typically takes at least 4-6 months to really make a difference, so PPC “could” provide a temporary boost your for traffic, if you’re needing a few quick wins. However, if you’re after long term sustainable results we advise blog writing and inbound content marketing as the primary driver of traffic with PPC as a supplement.

At Blog Writing Services UK, a comparatively new start up, we’re very familiar with the challenges involved in driving traffic to a new website, especially if you’re bootstrapped and looking to keep costs low. We practice what we preach, focussing on content marketing, blogging and guest blogging. Through providing valuable, useful content to our target market, we’ve not only been able to boost our DA and drive traffic, but also build an engaged audience, a critical component in building a sustainable business that will thrive.

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