There are a couple things wrong with this code snippet. First, you don't need to specify a SearchCursor just to look through a table. The UpdateCursor has the ability to read row values and update through a single iteration. Secondly, when assigning a value to a row, you need to set the index of the field to the value (row[0] = row[0][:2] + ' pig') based on the index set in the cursor (line 2). Lastly, the UpdateCursor updates rows at a time after each iteration... meaning you set the values of each field, then update the entire row (cursor.updateRow(row)) specified in line 3.
import arcpy
with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor("SepticTankPermit layer",['pid','pidgis']) as cursor:
for row in cursor:
if row[0] in [None,'','NULL']:
row[1] = row[1][:2] #etc...
elif row[1] in [None,'','NULL']:
row[0] = row[0][:2] #etc...
else:
print "Row not updated..."
cursor.updateRow(row)
del cursor