What career should I choose? SEO or PPC?

SEO and PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising are the two most popular techniques used in online marketing. However, there is a difference between the parameters, which are behind the success of each of these techniques. To understand this difference, let us first understand the difference between the purposes of these techniques.

SEO is a long term, labor intensive and a cost effective method to drive relevant website traffic. PPC, however, is relatively a quick, less resource intensive and a costly technique for website traffic building.

Due to the above differences, there is a greater amount of spending (i.e. 85% of spending on search engine marketing) on PPC than SEO. However, in a given organization, the number of people employed for PPC would be typically 3-5 times less than the number of people working on SEO. Consequently, although the number of job openings in the SEO sector is high, the responsibility (size of the budget) of the PPC Advertising professional is bigger than an SEO professional. Moreover, organizations are increasingly relying on PPC and other forms of online advertising compared to SEO. In small organizations and even in some large organizations using search engine marketing, a single individual plays both the roles. As the importance of the initiative grows, separate roles and even teams get created.

The skill sets required for an SEO role are different than the skill sets required to be a PPC expert. However, good communication skills are must for both the roles. PPC in general is more creative than SEO. At the same time, a PPC professional requires a high level of analytical and quantitative abilities than an SEO professional.

Having said all this, given the rate at which Search Engine Marketing industry is growing, both the SEO and the PPC Advertising segments offer lucrative careers.

Pradeep Chopra
Co-Founder, OM Careers