Is it better to pay for advertising or do SEO for the website?

IMO, it's not either/or, it's both. And those aren't the only methods of promotion. You can also try things like recruiting affiliates.

I have paid several thousand dollars into PPC ads on Google and the ROI was not worth the money spent. I am sure there are "tricks" to the trade of PPC, but I guess I wasn't savvy to them. All I saw was my ad dollars being wasted. I have not spent any money on advertising in at least 2 years. All of the business I generate is from SEO and SMM. Local SEO is something that I focus on for my local business, but making a real brand and doing hard core SEO is something I am currently working on. I am sure if I had $5k a month to spend on PPC and other paid ads, I would see a good amount of business from it, but that is not in my budget, so SEO is all I really have at my disposal.

I agree with MAGAMAN777; today get a prospect cost minimum $1 and is very hard to have a profit. I recommend you spend several months writing valuable content for your audience and wait for free traffic. If you offer help instead selling, surely you will get prospects that buy your product or service.

Regards

SEO and advertising is two different areas not sure why you think its linked.

SEO is must for the website which usually make sure the website is built on approved standard of web technologies and properly optimized.

Running behind Web ranking is like student behind the ranks. You may get it but it really doesn't convert to value. So the best is to simply focus on quality of product and let the product speak itself.

If the intention is to spread the words.. then, you can use the strategy of a Light beacon starts from the nearest and spread slowly.

In my experience of spending up to approximately $2500 a month on both SEO work (conducted over months and years) and Google Adwords (PPC - turn on turn off) [for a total of $5000 per month], I found that Adwords was by far the better and more profitable option.

I was never an Adwords super guru but I kept learning, split testing and trying new things whenever time allowed. I also found that despite using a number of different SEO providers the competition in my space/niche was extremely fierce, and if we did make page 1 we didn't always stay there for long. Whereas with Adwords, we just paid the money and BANG... on page 1, and the customer goes into the sales funnel. Before long I'd refined the funnel so that I knew our income was greater than our costs from using Adwords, so we just started maxing out the dollars we could throw at Adwords at the time, and it was happy sailing.

its better to do seo for software companies to rank in higher position rather than doing adwords and paying ads

Google Adwords is always helpful and result oriented if used in proper manner. investors loss valuable money in Adwords just because they dont know how to design campaign, target right audience, location, devices etc.

While working for Adwords/PPC, make sure to design campaign as per service, product and customer behavior.

Google adwords with high quality score and proper design brings high conversion on low budget.

I think the best visitors or clients come from google. So, try your best to rank in google. It will be the best.

Listen, If you do seo, than it will be more beneficiary for you as compare to google adwords. Money which you want to pay for advertising - google adwords is for a short period of time. If you pay/invest money to seo executives, than it will be for long time. I am not telling you to not to advertise through ppc, if you are capable to do both than result will be good.

I think, SEO is the best way to rank or publish a website. Because, In my point of view, It will help you better than advertising. You can do it without any money. Just take time and do as it your way. Thanks.

Most of the time you should be doing both. But if you are promoting some products its better to do some ads at first which will give you a kickstart

If you want get organic results or searches then you have to use SEO techniques.even its takes time to get ranking.but you will get best results with it. Once you will get top rank you will surely get huge traffic with organic searches for long time.

paid traffic is always king...

that being said, i do put out content, both posts and videos every week for both of my niches

-Ike Paz

Both are fine method to generate targeted traffic so you should decide with which method you are comfortable

Yes, you can promote your website in Google Adwords without any issue. It will certainly help you to drive some huge traffic to your website. But It does not help you in SEO. You can to do some work on your site on page and Off page seo in order to get rank in Google.

Both.

Its pretty hard to beat the speed of paid traffic, regardless of
what level you are at.

But you can also compound that with posting posts on the site
everyday which can also drive traffic and revenue for the
company.

Just my $0.02

Isaiah Jackson

For my websites (niche oriented) it turned out that paid advertising has the best ROI. This is because the targeted traffic is always converting very well. I do only google and facebook advertising.

Both have their own advantages.If you are a beginner then start SEO for your site in order to rank high in the search engine . Along with SEO you can also experience with paid marketing in the beginning, such as through Facebook advertising and google AdWords but with a low budget.
because advertising through AdWords is not an easy task to do , for better understanding watch some tutorial on Youtube or read Neil Patel blog in order to get a clear idea and then start advertising. For SEO skills you can take help from Moz blog,Rand Fishkin white board Friday lectures or search engine land etc

One thing you have to remember in paid marketing that always start with low budget like 5 to 10 dollars .the reason of starting with low budget is to save yourself from a bad experience . When you get familiar with it ,​ then you can increase your budget according to your budget line

I vote for good content, guest's posts, interaction with visitors.

I do blogging and SEO and buy solo ad traffic. Do both.

Why not do both?

I see no reason why they should be exclusive to one another.

SEO is relatively simple, and best of all, free...who doesn't want free traffic, right?

I find most SEO companies way over charge for their services. Often times they will take advantage of people who don't know any better, charging exorbitant prices to post a few links or supposedly "monitor" your websites online reputation.

PPC & SEO both are good to get a traffic. But you should choose the method,Based on your comfortable.
If you want instant traffic and publicity to your website, you can choose PPC & do it on the correct way. Definitely you will get a traffic.
If you want to improve your website without pay, it will take time to bring visitors. So, If you choose SEO & do it effectively means, can see the results organically after some time.

I would say both, but if i would have to choose, i would choose paying for advertising because it's faster and more precise.

Definitely both

But remember good SEO will lower your PPC cost. (quality score)

My plan start with seo post everyday on your site and start with bing adds less expensive

SEO is just a way to make search engines take your website into consideration and rank it higher eventually.

But if you want to get directly to your clients, without having to wait for the SEO to take effect, you should definitely buy advertisments.

If you want immediate results, Then go with paid advertising. You could be sitting around for months doing SEO and get no where. What I like to tell people is to focus on paid advertising first and SEO as your side hobby.

And people who think SEO is cheap... It's not. You either pay for it with expensive services every month. Or you pay for it with your time. Which one do you value more?

Sure paid advertising costs something upfront, but you get a return immediately. And if you are lucky you could be profitable from day one. The best part about paid advertising? Once you become profitable you can let the ad run on auto-pilot and let it make money for you. I've had ads that gave me a return of 1000%. Meaning for every dollar I spent on advertising I got $10 back. All I had to do is make sure the ad was running everyday (10 mins of work) and I was making money.

To sum it up... paid advertising is the quickest, most consistent way you will ever come close to becoming 'rich overnight' as they say. That doesn't mean you shouldn't focus on SEO either, but you should let someone else focus on it for you. Put some of your profits from paid advertising into SEO services and a couple months down the line you might start seeing some payoffs from doing SEO. Either way...

Paid advertising should be your main priority and SEO should be a side project.

I say to a mix of both PPC and a well thought out SEO campaign.

The thing is though, I wouldn't just limit yourself to Google Adwords. I would also look into Microsoft Ad Center (Yahoo & Bing) and also Facebook ppc ads.

Also, as a quick guide to start getting some good organic listing fast, do a Google search on a handful of company's you know of and are somewhat related to what you are offering, and note what posting sources are appearing on the first five or so pages of Google and add those to your own sites that you post to.