Thread: PPC Advertising vs. SEO

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.

Free actually is the best one IMO -- it takes some time, but there is nothing better than when you see your site appearing on top in a search engine after the efforts you did

I agree, why pay to get your site listed as a featured link using ppc!

SEO is free and will yield you the best results as well, being listed in directories, on forums/blogs and social bookmarks as a relevant resource or reference, is better than showing up on SERP's, there is also the chance that you are paying to be listed and not even getting any clicks!

Most people ignore featured listings on top of SERPS because they already automatically know that that link is not what they are looking for, but what google or any other SE thinks that they are looking for.

Has anyone ever found a featured link that was actually useful and relevant to their search query?!!!!

Originally Posted by BiologyWebmaster

I agree, why pay to get your site listed as a featured link using ppc!

SEO is free and will yield you the best results as well, being listed in directories, on forums/blogs and social bookmarks as a relevant resource or reference, is better than showing up on SERP's, there is also the chance that you are paying to be listed and not even getting any clicks!

Most people ignore featured listings on top of SERPS because they already automatically know that that link is not what they are looking for, but what google or any other SE thinks that they are looking for.

Has anyone ever found a featured link that was actually useful and relevant to their search query?!!!!

greatly said mate.

And why not to use these two strategies simultaneously? I think that SEO won't prevent PPC from securing perfect results.

Both strategies have their own benefits. PPC is very efficient in creating lots of leads and SEO is long term. if you need leads then just start using PPC else keep doing SEO

Hi) i dont't understad what the question is.....start with SEO if your budget is limited, if you have enough money do both)))

Originally Posted by vasilisa

Hi) i dont't understad what the question is.....start with SEO if your budget is limited, if you have enough money do both)))

I totally agree with you... The best strategy would be both.

Originally Posted by andr114

SEO won't prevent PPC from securing perfect results.

I agree SEO won't prevent you from also engaging in paid advertising, but once you begin your paid ad campaigns, that is all you will be thinking about.

Setting up ad locations, monitoring clickthrough rates, coming up with ads, setting up new ad campaigns, maybe creating promotions or sales ad, coniciding these ads with whatever you are trying to sell or promote, designing ads, monitoring where and when your ad shows up in search results, choosing what keywords will be in your ad...etc., etc., etc..

This opens up a huge can of worms, which can be very daunting and overwhelming.

I am not saying to not participate in PPC, but my fear for any webmaster is that once you engage in PPC it will take all of your attention away from your SEO strategy.

SEO is constantly changing and most seem to become complaisant with their SEO once they feel that is has reached a certain point.

In reality SEO requires constant working with and forethought if you want your site to succeed in search engine rankings.

Another alternative is to use Cahoola for driving some web traffic. It is a bit like adsense and adwords rolled into one, and its free traffic.