Often SEO and Google Ads PPC (formerly AdWords) are thought to be interchangeable as they both lead to better visibility on Google.
However, this could not be further from the truth.
SEO thought leader Eli Schwartz summarised the difference between Organic and Paid Search perfectly when he compared SEO to buying a house vs Paid Search as renting a house.
If you have a mortgage, it may be costing you, but at least you are building equity in your home. When you rent, all the money goes to the landlord who could ask you to vacate at any time, within the constraints of the law of course!
With Paid Search, as soon as you stop paying Google, you disappear. With SEO, the money you have invested keeps on working to provide long term search engine visibility.
This is not to say there is no place for Paid Search. Paid Search works very well when a business has no visibility in Google for keywords that have buyer intent. It's a quick and easy way for businesses to grab a share of the market.
However, as a long term strategy for gaining page 1 visibility, SEO works far better as it not only builds brand awareness and trust amongst prospects, it also performs better from a click through perspective.
Although Google places paid ads at the top of page 1, people tend to trust the organic results more.
40% of page 1 traffic goes to the no.1 result in Google vs only 2% to the no.1 ad!
