We have seen argument for many years on the benefits and drawbacks of Pay per click (PPC) versus Search engine optimization (SEO) – with a lot of people holding strong opinions for and against both. This is a massive topic – way too much to deal with completely in this post, but I’ll summarise the highlights and give my viewpoint on the subject.

Some Pay per click pros

Rapid outcomes – can normally start to see results within hours (or even minutes) of initiating a advertising campaign

Pay only when a visitor clicks

Fairly easy to target the Keywords you want

Don’t always need to modify your site

Good Monitoring capabilities (making it simple to check, measure, modify and enhance)

You’re able to define where users go (you specify the website landing page)

Are able to target precise regions/places for your ad to appear

Attain Page 1 visibility easily (however, not necessarily at low cost)

PPC can be an effective way to get exposure for a site (in particular a new website). However whenever you stop paying, your ads stop showing, and the visitors stop coming – there may be few long term benefits. PPC is comparatively quick and easy to setup – but remember that it is also easy for your competitors – if they’ve bigger budgets, they could ultimately win.

As long as you recognize what you are prepared to spend per click, and are assured that the rewards outweigh the expense, Paid advertising can be extremely effective. You wouldn’t for example mind if it costs you a couple of thousand dollars (or more) each day as long as it generates $5,000.

PPC is one of the few ways a recently released site could get included in the search results and start to get traffic (and revenue) while the long run Search engine optimization strategies kick in. The statistics generated from a Pay per Click Campaign (such as which keywords and phrases are resulting on conversions) may also be a very useful way to obtain data for a Search Engine Optimization campaign.

Seo Advantages

Below are some of the advantages of Search engine optimization:

Site visitors coming from Natural Search are totally free

The rankings a website achieves as a result of SEO can continue for a period of time after the work has been finished

On-page improvements (which are probably necessary for Search engine optimization) can help increase conversions in addition to traffic

Normally more searchers click on the organic search engine results (88%) versus the pay per click ads (12%), so you are likely to get considerably more traffic from Organic results.

Users usually believe Organic Search results have got a higher “confidence” level

Of course SEO is not free – it requires work and investment, frequently over a long period. In some reasonably competitive niches it can be quite challenging (or even impossible) to accomplish page 1 rankings, but in most niche categories it’s possible to reasonably easily achieve good rankings and traffic. As far as I am concerned, it’s the user that ought to be at the heart of any Search engine optimization methods. Pretty much whatever you do to enhance the end user experience is likely to increase your rankings and conversion rates (and in due course increase sales/inquiries)

Both Paid advertising and Search engine optimization have their advantages and disadvantages and dependant upon your specific preferences, one or the other (or maybe both) could be best for your needs.

This article has been written by the author, Eric James. Should you require anymoreshiatsu massagerplease visit his neck massager resources!