SEO vs. PPC
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Tue, Feb 09, 2010
Which strategy is best for my Business? Is it PPC Campaign or SEO (search engine optimization) and Link Building or Both? If both are important then what is the right mix? How much should I spend on PPC and how much on SEO? Which one has the high success rate? Which one is easy to manage? These are the questions which almost all business owners ask to themselves or to the experts while developing their online marketing strategies.
But before that, in case you don’t know the difference between PPC and SEO. Let me explain it to you. As the name imply in PPC, You pay to search engines or any other publisher for the clicks you get on your adverts in others word the traffic you are getting is Paid Traffic. On the Other Hand, In SEO you work on your website to improve its organic rankings in Search engines for your keywords and to get free traffic for your website (Free traffic here does not mean that SEO is free as you might have to spend money on SEO Experts and link building.).
Now the Question is which one is better? So, before jumping to a conclusion let me tell you the Pros and Cons of both PPC and SEO.
FREE SEO White Paper
Pay Per Click Campaigns
Pros - Do you have a new site and need some quick exposure? PPC Campaigns can give you quick results. You can launch your campaigns within hours and start getting traffic on your website.
PPC campaigns are easy to monitor and allows you to do more specific testing, providing you with detailed analysis of important things like how many times your ad had been shown, How many people clicked on them, Which ad got maximum clicks, what is the conversion rate etc.
PPC Campaigns are easy to control. You can control the placement of your ads, location where you want your ad to show, stop your campaign anytime you want.
PPC campaigns are also very effective to test the impact of changes in site architecture on conversion rate.
PPC campaigns are great if you are going to promote some seasonal items and when it is not feasible to wait for improvement in organic rankings.
Cons - PPC campaigns don’t have long term value. Your ads would disappear from search engines and content networks if you stop spending money on them
A big budget is required to run PPC campaigns if your niche is highly competitive and you are competing against big brands.
Paid ads get only 10% of clicks whereas organic search results get 90% of total clicks.
Search Engine Optimization
Pros - Organic Search results get 90% of clicks as compare to paid ads which get only 10% of clicks. It means you can get much more traffic if you can get top positions in organic results.
You don’t have to pay for extra traffic you get due to improvement of your website rankings in organic search results.
You can stop your SEO (search engine optimization) and link building campaigns for few months once your rankings become stable in Search results and can enjoy free traffic.
Proper SEO and Link Building would help you to increase the overall authority of your website.
You can easily beat the big brands without spending huge amount of money if your website is of high quality.
Cons - SEO and Link Building is a time consuming process. It usually takes 6-8 months or even more to achieve the top results in organic rankings depending on the quality of your website and competition in your niche.
No control on the Rankings of website and no guarantee of results because organic results are very unpredictable.
You may need to change your complete website architecture if your website is not user friendly as a part of onsite optimization.
As you have seen the pros and cons of both marketing strategies, the selection of the SEO or PPC depends on the purpose of your campaign. If you are looking for quick exposure for your new business then PPC campaign is your best option but if you are looking for long term solution then focus on your SEO and link building campaigns. Business owners need to maintain a proper balance between their SEO and PPC activities. While, Money spent on SEO should be considered as long term investment for your business, PPC campaigns should be used only to fill out the gaps which cannot be achieved with SEO like running ads on content networks, for doing research of proper keywords or to test the new design of website.
