SEO vs. PPC – Which is best for you ?

When it comes to boosting traffic to your business online or your website in general, you have two basic options: pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or search engine optimization (SEO). Let’s face it, you should be doing SEO to some degree and you are more than likely doing it unknowingly if you have not planned to do so. If you are looking to boost traffic, you probably should be doing PPC as the two work well together.

Unlike PPC (pay per click) which is only really effective for sites that can monetize traffic for more than the cost per click, SEO is a tactic on the other hand that common sense suggests should be undertaken by all websites, at least at a basic level. Every website should be using basic SEO tactics to ensure that their site ranks highly for a search on their brand name or a service in which they might provide.

If you choose to, you can pay for your website’s traffic using PPC advertising programs such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search and many others, while these two remain most used online. What these online advertising portals allow is they enable you to display ads in the sponsored results section of each search engine’s results page. You will then have to part with a fee which is based on how competitive your chosen keyword is and whenever a viewer clicks through from your ad to your website when it appears in the search engines.

On the other hand you can build traffic for free by achieving higher rankings in the natural search results the listings displayed next to and underneath the sponsored results – the paid/sponsored results in the search engines searches will always take precedence over natural results. To get started you will need to follow basic and intermediate SEO best practices to try to get that website displayed on these pages more prominently and more often. SEO can take some time and there is no definite time limit as to how long it will take to reach the top of the natural results, but the free, targeted traffic will probably prove to be well worth the investment.

Some main points to get you thinking about choosing between SEO and PPC -

How big is my marketing budget?
Do you have a long time in which to implement SEO practise to boost your ranking?
Can I afford PPC long term or short term?
Are my PPC keywords too competitive?
SEO is free (apart from my time)