Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) Vs Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

PPC advertising and SEO are important online marketing techniques that are used to drive traffic to a website. As far as PPC is concerned, in this type of advertising ads are placed on the top of organic search results or at the right side of the organic search results and the advertiser advertising his brand through PPC has to pay a specific amount of money when someone clicks on the advertisement. While, Search Engine optimization is related to optimizing a website for specific keywords in order to improve website ranking for those keywords on search engines.

Let us compare PPC with SEO in detail to understand which one is better for your business.

PPC ads are paid. It means with PPC ads you are paying the price of visitor’s visit to your site. A lot of factors are taken into consideration to determine price of PPC ads such as how popular is your targeted keyword, how many advertisers want to use your targeted keyword, monthly searches for the keyword, position of ad, etc. But a good thing about PCC is you only have to pay when someone clicks on your ad, you are not bound to pay for ad views. You can calculate price of PPC ad with help of Google Keyword Tool and control your PPC ad campaign likewise.

Traffic generated by successful SEO campaign is free. You are not required to pay to rank higher on the first page of search engine. As a lot of advertisers will be using same keyword therefore, what you all need is a good website and a great SEO plan to drive traffic to your site.

PPC ads are highly targeted they only appear for potential clients. Therefore, they convert more visitors. On the other hand, a single web page ranks for many keywords therefore a visitor may not find your web page 100% relevant to his query/ need.

According to research, 85 percentage online searchers click on organic searches while only 15 percent click on PPC ads. It implies that organic searches get more clicks than PPC ads.

PPC advertising is remarkable for instant results. As soon as the ad is placed on top of organic search results or at the right side of organic search results on first page of search engine, you will see traffic coming to your site. It is to be noted that more ad clicks mean more traffic, but it also means more spending on ads.

On the other hand, we cannot ignore the fact that it may take months or even years for your website to get top ranking for specific keywords on search engines.

According to research, majority of visitors visit top 5 websites on first page of search engine. Once your website gets one of the top 5 rankings on the first page of search engine for specific keywords then it will have continuous flow of traffic. While traffic generated by PPC ads is temporary. Once you stop paying for the ad, it will disappear and you will face a sudden drop in traffic.

If you do not have enough experience and knowledge related to SEO and PPC then it is better to hire an expert. Running SEO campaign without necessary knowledge and experience will lead you to loss of traffic and sales. While, if you don’t have enough knowledge to run PPC campaign you will end up with loss of traffic and money invested in ads.

In the light of above presented- information, we can say that PPC ads are short- term solution to drive traffic to your site while SEO is a long lasting solution to drive traffic to your site. It is better to use both of these techniques if you are a startup and have enough budgets. First, drive traffic with help of PPC ads then optimize your site for keywords that performed better in PPC ads.