Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising Or Organic SEO
I was asked the other day which would be the better investment, pay-per-click (PPC) or organic SEO? It is an interesting question as both are designed to deliver targeted visitors to your web site or blog. But which is the better investment.
PPC involves advertising in various formats across a variety of sites. Site owners and the advertising company receive income based on the number of visitors to their site that click on the ad unit to arrive on your site. The cost to you varies and can often involve a bidding system where you need to set a budget and limit on the keywords used for your advertising program. This can be as little as a penny per click – you can also much much higher per click rates as well.
The downside to PPC advertising is that in a bidding system, you may find yourself constantly outbid for the keywords you are targeting. An even bigger problem of course is that once your budget has been devoured your traffic will dry up.
Organic SEO involves getting as high up on the search engines results pages as possible and receiving traffic through those results. The benefits from a good organic SEO program is that traffic should increase for as long as you are at the top of those search engine results.
The downside to organic SEO is that ic can take a fair while to develop so traffic increases will not happen overnight. A further downside is that SEO is a continual process. It is not a process that is done once and then forgotten. You need to be constantly working to keep your keywords as close to the top as possible.
So which is better, PPC or organic SEO? I don’t see this as a real argument. Organic SEO should be done as a matter of course. PPC can be used to generate traffic over the shorter period whilst you are waiting for your SEO efforts to take affect.
If you are serious about generating organic traffic for an extended period of time then your budget must be set to take into account organic SEO, PPC campaigns or some other form of advertising and a social optimisation program. A complete program may may not cost as much as you may think, the results in terms of traffic and sales will be well worth the effort.
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