Search Engine Optimization or Pay Per Click: Which Campaign Should You Choose?

Summary: Whenever we hear the word online marketing, the two most popular visibility enhancing methods: search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising come to our mind. At present, we also have options like email marketing and banners on portals, but SEO and PPC are excellent sources for new marketers who are venturing into the world of online advertising.

The World Wide Web has evolved from a mere channel of communication and information spreading to the source of business expansion. You cannot ignore the channel that is growing at a rate of 30 percent each year. But, before you decide which internet marketing option to go with, it is essential to have a closer look at both of them.

Search Engine Optimization

You can call SEO as a natural and organic process that involves the optimization of a website by adding keywords, links and meta tags to make it search engine friendly. Through SEO, you can increase the popularity of the site by acquiring or paying for the links pointing to your site.

Pay Per Click

Because more people are turning to the Internet for getting information and search purpose, they are becoming more aware of the paid results as marketing tools. PPC is the perfect example of Internet marketing. A research showed that 38 percent searchers are not only aware of the different between paid and unpaid results, but 54 percent know the different on PPC marketing on Google.

In Pay Per Click advertising, the marketer buys a space on search engine. The campaign helps in getting top position by bidding for certain keywords that are related to the products and services of the marketer.

Both the Internet marketing options have their pros and cons. It is said that SEO is an easy and cost-effective marketing option. But this is not at all true. If you have optimized a website, you need a proper team to monitor its performance and find out if some other site is ranked before your website. SEO is a long process and you need to have deeper understanding of web technologies and search engine algorithms to get top ranking for your site. Therefore, if you opt for an SEO service, confirm if the company is giving you a maintenance contract.

Whether It’s PPC or SEO

If you talk about return on investment or ROI, SEO obviously has higher rates than PPC because:

• It is a common tendency of search engine users that they click more on natural search results than on the PPC ads. Therefore, you get more traffic on site through an SEO campaign, even after paying less.
• Many users say that SEO results are more relevant than the paid results. In a research, 72.3 percent users on Google felt that organic results are more relevant, while 27.7 percent were in favor of PPC results.
• In SEO, you pay and acquire links that point to your website. These links give ever lasting results and a top rank to the site on search engine. Along with this, the links also attract more traffic to the site.

Search Engine Optimization has one of the biggest weaknesses and that is: SEO requires more efforts and time.

You need to invest more time to generate links, tweak the web pages as well as keywords to give ranking to the site. Although, the whole process could take up more than three months, but the benefits will be more.

Such a long list of benefits does not mean that PPC advertising is bad. It has many benefits like you get instant results without waiting for a long period (like you have to do in an SEO campaign). Here are some prominent benefits of PPC:

• What you get with a PPC campaign is an immediate flow of qualified visitors, sales and leads. This will provide you quick results. If you are in no mood to wait for a period of 3 months to get results, PPC is the option for you.
• It is the marketer who decides the budget of a PPC campaign. If you are not happy with the results of the campaign, you are free to discontinue it immediately.
• You can address other sites and portals having affiliate marketing programs through a PPC campaign. This will generate higher traffic for you.

We cannot deny that organic search engine optimization has some advantages over PPC advertising. But, there are certain scenarios and situations where PPC advertising makes more monetary and strategic sense. If you are still confused about choosing the campaign, it is better to experience both. Go for an SEO campaign as well as run a PPC campaign simultaneously to see which one works better for you.