Two of the most popular eCommerce marketing strategies are search engine optimization(SEO) and pay per click(PPC). While many businesses engage in one or both of these practices, there is often confusion about which is best for their eCommerce site. Today we’ll cover some advantages and disadvantages of each of these strategies.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a fairly involved process aimed at helping your business climb the search engine results in order to increase your organic traffic. There are many facets to a successful SEO campaign, but on page optimization and link building are the two most common practices. Optimizing your page involves ensuring that the correct keywords and tags are used on your site. This tactic is used to ensure search engine algorithms find your site when users look for those relevant keywords. Link optimization is all about building links to pages with information relevant to your business. Because this content contains links to your site, search algorithms will see this content and attribute it to your page. High-quality content with the correct balance of relevant keywords will make search engines trust your site and refer their users to you. SEO is all about making search engines see your business as an authority in your field. Though SEO is a lengthy process, it can yield incredible results. The whole idea of SEO is that you are constantly increasing your link equity in order to stay ahead of the competition, meaning it is typically a process spanning months or years. Though SEO campaigns are time-consuming, they almost always give you the best results for your expense. This is because SEO builds lasting equity for your brand, making you more visible on the search engines where 90% of internet traffic begins.
Pay Per Click
PPC is more in line with what most businesses consider when they think about advertising online. When you engage in PPC marketing, your company is paying for each click on an advertisement for your site. Search engine PPC is one of the most popular forms of PPC where businesses bid for a top spot for their ads to appear when users search for a certain keyword. PPC’s biggest advantage is its speed. Unlike SEO, you don’t have to sow your seeds and wait to reap the benefits. Once you begin a PPC campaign, you can expect a pretty immediate increase in traffic while the campaign is ongoing. Another big advantage of PPC is you can track results quickly and easily. You can also easily change gears with PPC to target different keywords and shift the source of your traffic. Sadly, PPC is only effective while the campaign is ongoing. Once the campaign is over, you won’t retain the work you put into it and your brand will no longer have the visibility it once did.
Better Together
There are amazing benefits to running SEO and PPC side by side. PPC advertising can provide an instant traffic increase while SEO begins to improve your ranking. During this time, you can also use PPC for keyword research. The analytics of your PPC campaign to help identify the perfect keywords that draw users to your web page. These keywords can then be added to your SEO campaign. Once you start to see the benefits from your SEO campaign after a few months, you can either decrease your PPC or continue using it to target new markets.
Here at 1Digital Agency, our team digital marketing team can help your business implement one or both of these strategies. Our SEO team can help you choose the perfect keywords to drive up your organic traffic to your site. The PPC specialists on our staff can help you which search queries to advertise on that will produce the most traffic at the lowest cost. No matter what marketing strategy your business needs, 1Digital Agency is your path to success.
A decision framework: which one, when, and how much
"Better together" is the right conclusion, but most businesses need to know how to split effort and budget at their stage. Use this as a starting point:
- New site, need revenue this quarter: lead with PPC. SEO has not had time to compound, and paid traffic both generates sales and produces the keyword/conversion data that sharpens the SEO plan.
- Established site, thin organic presence: invest in SEO as the durable asset while running PPC on your highest-intent terms so you are not absent from the results page while rankings build.
- Strong organic rankings already: shift PPC budget toward terms you do not rank for, competitor-conquesting, and promotions — stop paying for clicks you would earn organically anyway, except defensively on your brand terms.
- Seasonal or launch spike: PPC for the burst (it is instantly dialable), SEO for the baseline that carries between spikes.
The unit economics you should actually compare
The honest comparison is not "SEO is cheaper" vs "PPC is faster." It is cost per acquisition over time. PPC has a near-constant marginal cost: stop paying, the traffic stops. SEO has high upfront cost and a declining marginal cost — the content and links keep returning traffic after the spend ends, so cost-per-acquisition trends down as the asset matures. Model both on a 12–24 month horizon, not a single month, or you will systematically under-invest in the channel that compounds.
How they feed each other (the part most teams skip)
- PPC → SEO: search-term and conversion data from paid campaigns is the fastest way to find the keywords actually worth ranking for, before committing months of content effort.
- SEO → PPC: high-converting organic landing pages make excellent paid landing pages; pages that rank also tend to have the relevance that improves Quality Score and lowers cost-per-click.
- Both → SERP coverage: owning an organic result and an ad for a high-intent query measurably increases total clicks and signals authority — the two are not redundant.
Frequently asked questions
If I can only afford one, which should I pick? Depends on time horizon. Need sales now and can sustain the spend: PPC. Building a durable lower-cost channel and can wait a few months for traction: SEO. Most growing businesses eventually need both because they solve different problems.
Does running PPC help my SEO rankings directly? No — paid clicks are not a ranking factor. The benefit is indirect but real: faster keyword and conversion learning, more SERP real estate, and shared high-converting landing pages.
How long until SEO pays off versus PPC? PPC produces traffic the day it launches; SEO typically takes a few months to build meaningful organic traffic and longer for competitive terms — but its cost-per-acquisition keeps improving while PPC's holds roughly flat.
We run both under one roof so they actually reinforce each other. See our SEO services and PPC management, or contact us to map the right split for your stage.