SEO vs. PPC
November 23, 2010
Two of the most popular ways of promoting your business online are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns. If done correctly they both have the ability to get you on the first page of the search engines for your targeted terms, but the question is, which one gives you the most bang for your buck?
PPC is an advertising service where you choose certain keywords to create a listing with and each time that listing is “clicked” you pay a certain amount of money. The amount of money you pay for each click is determined by the competiveness of the term. If it is a very competitive term that many other advertisers are going after you basically have to outbid them for that top spot. As you can imagine, this can get quite pricey! In addition to being expensive this is also a short term fix. As soon as you stop paying, those links disappear and so does your traffic and rankings.
SEO is the act of optimizing your website to target specific keywords and phrases that are most relevant to your business and that will entice people searching for those terms to come to your site and hopefully purchase your service or product. You are pretty much just ensuring that your site’s content is in good shape and then you get your pages to move up by cultivating links from others sites. The more links you have, the more it boosts your rank in search results! SEO is less expensive and will also provide you long term results. Once you’ve taken the time to optimize your website it would take a really big change in the search engine’s algorithms to mess with your rankings.
Both SEO and PPC definitely have proven they can be beneficial for marketing your online business but when it comes to long term results the answer of which one to choose is pretty clear – SEO! SEO is not only cheaper but it will support your site throughout its life. I’m not saying PPC isn’t worth doing, but please be sure to support it with a solid SEO foundation so you have something to fall back on when your PPC piggy bank is out of change.