PPC Ads vs. SEO for Startup Frozen Food Brands

If you’re preparing your frozen food brand to succeed online, you’re likely to come across both pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) concepts, both of which offer various benefits and come with certain disadvantages. 

When deciding between PPC ads and SEO for a startup, there are some pros and cons to consider to help you make the right choice. Here we’ll review some of the key differences between PPC and SEO to help you decide which to use for your business.

How SEO and PPC Work

Search engine optimization, or SEO, entails optimizing a website to get higher rankings in search engines, such as Google. SEO is all about increasing organic traffic and getting people to find you when searching for you via search results. 

Meanwhile, PPC is a type of advertising model that charges businesses a set amount of money each time users click on an ad. PPC ads can include paid search ads that appear in search engines alongside organic search results, but they can also include ads on websites that are part of the search network. 

Simply put, SEO is essentially free as there is no cost-per-click involved but requires a tremendous amount of skill and is very time consuming, so this is best left for a professional. 

In contrast, PPC costs a certain amount of money to get results, but both can work together to maximize visibility and performance on search engines and elsewhere.

The Pros and Cons of SEO

SEO offers a number of advantages that make it ideal to use for many businesses, including frozen food brands just starting out. 

Pro: SEO Is Free to Implement

One of the main benefits is that SEO is free, that is if you are willing to do it yourself. You can reach new customers effectively without having to pay each time someone clicks your URL in the search results. 

With the right practices, you can outperform competitors on search engines by outranking them in the SERPs (search engine results pages). By creating plenty of rich content on your website, optimizing it with target keywords, and including links back to that content on other reputable websites, you can dramatically boost visibility.

Pro: SEO Yields Long-Term Results

Strong SEO with the right strategy can also get lasting results. It can take a long time to get them, but they often stick once search engines index and rank your pages. As a result, you can benefit from significantly higher ROI than what you might see with PPC.

Pro: SEO Naturally Leads to a Better Website

Because you need to earn organic traffic, you’ll likely spend more time optimizing your website to get better results. This involves creating rich, high-quality content with carefully and naturally incorporated keywords, along with other best practices. Google also favors content that users find engaging, which is why quality is just as important as quantity when it comes to the pages you build. In the process, you’ll be able to create a website that people find engaging and easy to navigate, with plenty of information.

Con: SEO Rankings Can Drop from Algorithm Changes

One of the potential downsides of SEO is that Google algorithm changes may negatively impact your organic rank. Google frequently releases new algorithm updates, which could inadvertently hurt your website and force you to work harder to restore rankings.

Con: SEO Takes a Long Time to Get Results

It’s important to keep in mind that SEO is a long game type of strategy. Regardless of how much effort you put into creating great content and optimizing your website for optimal performance, it can take as months or even a year or more before you see the results you want. This is particularly the case when trying to rank for highly competitive search terms that top competitors dominate. It may not be impossible to achieve high rankings with these keywords, but patience and diligence are vital virtues when it comes to SEO.

The Pros and Cons of PPC

Although SEO is great strategy for many businesses to rely on, PPC offers a number of benefits that make it worth the investment.

Pro: The Results of PPC Efforts Are Immediate

Unlike SEO, which can take months before you see the results you want, the effects of PPC are instantaneous, which gets you out there very quickly. This is vital, especially for startups that need to jumpstart traffic and sales. PPC is also great for established businesses looking to accelerate growth. The fast results also make PPC great for helping promote certain events or deals that only run for a limited time.

Pro: PPC Makes It Easier to Get to the Top of Search Results

With SEO, it takes a lot of time and effort to get into the top rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), but it’s far easier with PPC. The more you bid on the top positions, the higher your ads will rank to help maximize visibility.

You can get even better results from your PPC efforts if your website has a great quality score. If your site has a strong quality score, this means that most people who click through your ads and land on your site spend a lot of time on the corresponding pages. This indicates to Google and other search engines that your page includes relevant, engaging content that brings real value to users.

Pro: PPC Is Flexible

When building PPC campaigns, you have plenty of flexibility. You can select the specific keywords you want to target and bid on them, the placement for your ads, and the amount you’re willing to spend on ads per day. You also have the ability to instantly pause campaigns at any point if you wish to save money.

Con: PPC Costs Money

If you’re working with a tight budget, you may get limited results with PPC if you’re unable to afford the highest rankings and best placement for your ads. You also need to pay consistently to keep your ads running, which means that if you stop funding those ads, they disappear, unlike SEO efforts that stay put regardless of funding.

Con: People May Avoid PPC Ads

Each paid search ad appears in SERPs similar to the organic results. However, they include an “Ad” label that clearly identifies them as ads as opposed to webpages. Because of this, people may avoid clicking on them due to mistrust or uncertainty about their content, leading them to click on organic results beneath them.

Use a Combination of PPC and SEO to Get the Best Results

Ultimately, both SEO and PPC are worth using to help grow your frozen food business or any other eCommerce business. The best way to benefit from both worlds is to use the two simultaneously. If your budget allows for it, run PPC ads to rank for terms that might be extremely difficult or impossible to rank for with SEO. Meanwhile, SEO can help you achieve long-term results and not be reliant solely on paid ads. Together, they’ll help increase your company’s visibility and achieve the results you want.

If you would like to learn more about how to grow your frozen food brand, the team at Gray Growth Logistics is here to help. Reach out to us to find out how we can help your business flourish.