PPC Vs SEO – Which Is Best?

There has been argument for years about the pluses and minuses of Pay-per-click (PPC) as opposed to Search engine optimization (SEO) – with many people holding strong viewpoints for and against both. This is a massive topic – way too much to handle fully in this post, but I’ll summarise the highlights and present my point of view about the topic. Some Paid advertising perks

Rapid results – can typically start to see results within just hours (or even minutes) of activating a marketing campaign

Only pay when a visitor clicks

Fairly simple to concentrate on the Keywords you would like

Don’t always need to change your website

Good Tracking capabilities (so that it is easy to monitor, measure, change and enhance)

You get to determine where users go (you define the website landing page)

Can focus on precise regions/localities for your ad to be displayed

Achieve first page visibility easily (but not always cheaply)

Pay per click can be a very effective way to publicise an online site (in particular a new website). However whenever you stop spending, your ads stop showing, and your traffic volumes drop – there may be few long term benefits. PPC is reasonably quick and easy to setup – but it is just as quick and easy for all your competitors – if they have got deeper pockets, they may ultimately win.

As long as you understand what a click is worth to you, and are assured that the rewards outweigh the expense, Pay per click can be very effective. You wouldn’t for example mind if it costs you $2,000 (or more) a day provided that it generates $5,000.

PPC is amongst the few ways a completely new site can get seen in the search engine results and start to generate traffic (and income) while the long term Seo methods kick in. The statistics generated from a Pay Per Click Campaign (such as which key words are resulting on conversions) may also be a very useful source of information for an SEO campaign.

Search engine optimization Advantages

Listed here are some of the benefits of Search engine optimization:

Guests coming from Natural Search are Totally free

The search rankings a website accomplishes through SEO can easily persist for a long time after the work has been finished

On-page changes (that are almost certainly necessary for Search engine optimisation) can help strengthen conversions as well as traffic

In general more searchers click the organic search engine results (88%) versus the pay-per-click ads (12%), so you may well get a lot more visitors from Organic results.

Users generally believe Natural Search engine results have got a higher “trust” level

Of course SEO is not free – it needs work and expense, usually over a long period. In some competitive niches it can be very difficult (or even impossible) to obtain page 1 rankings, but in most markets it’s possible to quite easily achieve reasonable rankings and traffic. In any case, it’s the user that should be in the middle of any Search engine optimization techniques. Almost anything you can do to improve the user experience is likely to improve your search rankings and conversions (and in due course grow sales/inquiries)

Both Pay per click and Search engine optimisation have their pros and cons and depending on your specific circumstances, one or the other (or even both) could be best for your needs.