PPC Advertising vs. SEO

Marketing
1

There are two ways to get traffic to any site. You can either get traffic to your website for free, such as SEO or you can use paid advertising; PPC (pay-per-click).

Often, there is a debate and constant warring between which strategy will be the best strategy to implement in exposing your site to the masses.

In actuality, Internet Marketing is a numbers game, and so the more targeted traffic you can get to your website, the more you will convert, and the more money you’ll make.

So which strategy is the best, free or paid?

Search Engine Optimization:

Free marketing strategies; such as SEO, are just as good as paid marketing, if not better. For example, when the majority of people go searching for information online, they go to Google or any other search engine and type in a phrase; such as “How to Cook and Clean”. The results they get back are divided into two parts, and that is Organic and Paid advertising. These differences are usually easy to identify. The organic results are listed on the left hand side and are listed 1-10 through a series of pages, while the paid are listed on the far right hand side.

When doing a search people will often decide which way is best to resolve their dilemma or situation, and most often people tend to use the free results. Thus, this is enough to indicate that if you want to get highly targeted and free traffic to your website it would be a good idea to get into the Organic results. However, many things are involved, including getting backlinks to your site, making sure you have the right keyword density, and optimizing your site. The downside to Search Engine Optimization is that in order to get your website ranked high, it can be very time consuming. This is a reason why many marketers choose to skip SEO and use Pay-Per-Click with Google Adwords, Bing, or Yahoo Overture.

PAY PER CLICK (PPC):

In short, Pay-Per-Click is when you tell Google; or any other company, how much you want to be charged every time your advertisement is clicked. The higher the amount that you set to be charged will often determine how high your website will rank in the search engines. On the other hand, if you set a low amount then your PPC may not give you good results.

The “pros” of PPC marketing is that it takes a small amount of time to get up and running, but the “con” is that you can not just set up a campaign and expect to make tons of money. PPC is a science and should be implemented with strategy, therefore doing the homework is crucial because if you don’t choose the right keywords and/or charges you could end up losing tons of money and FAST. So PPC takes skill, learning, and possibly experience to succeed.

In short, SEO is a great way for beginners to get a site ranked high in organic results. SEO may be frustrating but once you succeed with SEO the benefits are great. This is also true with PPC, but there is much more risk involved since your success is dependent on your money and skill. Overall, it’s necessary to research both SEO and PPC as much as possible before leaning upon either.

2

I agree. One must make optimum use of all the resources available because the markets now have become really competitive.

3

I always use PPC for a new website as I hate having to wait to rank naturally. However, even on my established websites I use PPC but only sparingly and for set times a day.

4

Seo is for long term results and PPC is for short term, rightly said, a right combination of both can work well, SEO is the Base work, PPC may some times fail to deliver result, but if SEO done properly, the results can be very consistent.

5

PPC is only profitable for business since you can start selling your products. But in SEO, is lifetime where you can find a niche market, optimize your site for the target keywords, rank on the first page. Working for the page 1 in any SE.

6

Since seo is not guaranteed anyway, and if one is lucky enough to land high, the traffic still isn’t all that great, advertising is FAR better than organic traffic.

7

I always tell people that PPC gives immediate results in terms of visibility and traffic. Any search engine marketing initiative must start off with this. Unless your niche is not very competative and you have good organic ranking for your site.

For most websites out there, organic ranking is not good and therefore PPC is a good option. While this is running, start working on your SEO, which in most cases is the more longer term action, again depending on what you try to rank for.

8

Thumbs up for the SEO but there are some occasions where you will find the PPC produces best results. But after all here too PPC is combined with SEO. I mean the facebook ads for example.

9

Yep, SEO and PPC is good for bring traffic.
SEO maybe will take time but it sure it will give stable traffic after your site established.
PPC will be quick to make traffic, but if you have money. Beside that, if you stopped the funding, the traffic will be decreased drastically.
PPC is good if you have something to offered then you are sure(or high chance) people will buy it.

You can combine it, PPC for the earlier stage, along with building the SEO. Then after the SEO have been established, you can stop the PPC.

10

Combining free and paid methods really works for me. I really don’t focus on SEO. PPC works well initially if you want instant result. Once you have enough funds, try to implement other strategies. Again, combining free and paid methods are good. Pay for some advertising, look for a blog in your niche that is receiving tons of traffic every month, contact the blog owner and post your ads for a fee. Other than that, I go for article marketing, blog commenting, guest blogging, forum posting, social bookmarking etc… those are free methods that can give me long term results, especially article marketing. If you really have a good product, list it in clickbank and recruit tons of affiliates promoting your product, you can also seek affiliates and do joint ventures from forums. People likes to make money, so if they see your product is good, then most likely they will promote it to their list in exchange for a commissions.

11

In my opinion, SEO is a natural byproduct of your business and product. It is always an ongoing effort and if you are producing interesting content or your product rocks, you will get higher rankings automatically.

On the other hand, PPC is a sales tactic. Where you do the math and try to bring CPC < life time value of a customer * conversion rate.

12

An integrated marketing strategy is the best.

13

This is how I was advised; at first, PPC plus seo. Then slowly lower your PPC and increase seo. Hopefully by then, you serp has gotten up a little. PPC provides the initial visibility promoting your site and then SEO supports further.