PPC vs SEO

I agree with him to some extend. SEO is a long term thing, without guaranteed results. If you're in a competitive niche and there is just no way you'll ever reach those top spots in Google, don't bother with SEO.

Google AdWords on the other hand (or PPC in general if you like), is a very reliable way to get visitors to your website in the short term. Yes, it costs money, where free visitors are still free, but if you do it right, your PPC campaign should still be (very) profitable, and therefore a nobrainer.

However, that doesn't mean you should not put any effort into SEO. It still is a good idea to just optimize your website for search engines. I mean, even if you get a few visitors per month from the organic serp's, that's still some free traffic.

The problem is, if he is asked to pay $15,000 for SEO, will he be willing? I guess not. People expect to get big value for little, gone are those days.

Fact is, SEO still works just that the dimensions are a little bit difference now. Most of the links people use in the past have been devalued. And when they try to create their own network they go for the wrong domains.

The good thing is, he is making a good ROI otherwise he won't be indulging in that.

I also do PPC but that's before the keyword moves up which certainly takes time.

Well, if you ask me to choose between PPC and SEO, I will go for SEO.

Well he can afford to spend 150K a month on PPC. The average Joe does not have that kind of cash to throw around.

SEO is a difficult proposition. If you can get on to the front page of Google for a high search keyword string, you've basically hit the lottery. The problem is Google keeps changing the game so SEO is no sure thing for anyone. PPC, on the other hand, is more of a sure thing, but unless you got a pharmaceutical company that can bankroll your expensive PPC campaigns, you might as well look elsewhere.

It's not a one vs. another issue. I'd probably not deliberately spend too much time on SEO either, but I get at least as many sales from organic SEO traffic as I do from PPC ads.

Making your site SEO friendly certainly makes a lot of sense. Don't bother with all sorts of mysterious crap, just common sense in your internal links, page titles and content. It won't hurt and won't take much time. I keep SEO in mind when I add every new item to my store.

Obviously, PPC also makes sense, because you'll likely want more exposure than SEO gives you. So you use both.

Agreed with the CEO. Google is on a mission to kill SEO with

a) search ad layout/format changes to get more searchers to click ads
b) machine learning to quickly understand and kill loopholes being exploited by SEO's

As a result SEO will become so expensive, slow and unpredictable that businesses will be forced to consider advertising instead.

It's simple really. You want to spend money on SEO to w....a....i....t until you finally break into the top 10 after 2-3 months? What a waste of time, you could have made some money in that time.

And then the best they offer you is to be #4 - because the first 3 results are PPC.

Right, that settles it, have no intention to be #4 - the money is in the first 3 spots.

End of story.

Absolutely agree. PPC brings you laser targeted traffic without any question as to whether or not each click is costing you a fortune while being delivered junk traffic.

I see SEO only working in long tail keywords these days. When you're dealing with a specific niche that isn't saturated (does a non-saturated market even exist?), it could be worthwhile. Personally, PPC is the way to go.

Hi miridian45,

I recall a recent study that showed nearly 2 out of every 3 online sales, from a broad range of industries, originated from paid traffic. If you intend to be a dominant player in your industry you cannot afford to ignore two thirds of the market. In the long run you cannot become a major player in your niche if you are ignoring PPC traffic.

Go wherever your customers shop, if it's mainly PPC then you have to focus your marketing efforts there, or get crushed. Having said that, you shouldn't look at a single channel (i.e Search) as your only source of revenue. Your top competitors are likely using a more sophisticated approach, feeding the top of the funnel (branding & awareness) so that they are maximizing their direct response campaigns. You need to develop a multi-channel advertising strategy if you are competing in a highly competitive niche.

Best is adwords and bing. Solos are good as well, but you have to test a lot more....some duds that just take your money and the clicks are not coming as promised.

You really need a mix of both, Not to mention being active on sites related to your niche. You need great SEO. In order to get that do keyword research. As far as PPC goes, It really helps engage those who would not ordinarily visit your site.

You really take time to guest post and comment on other blogs as well. Gaining credibility on the web is a must. If you want to gain a loyal following.

I do agree that PPC is very useful but not for long term business leads generation. As much you invest, the amount you earn either a truck of money. But if you do proper SEO of your business then it appears for long term in Google and gives you benefit. Just do it properly or hire a company who is providing these services. A company like VirtueNetz having good resources will be really useful for you. All other information is also useful and good learning.

Greetings Guys. First post here ;-) I run just over 30 online shops in good old germany.

PPC is quite effective - the most effective channel to start with most of the time. Regrettably it also has a lot of downsides, especially googles "main target" to earn most of the money in the end ;-)

So if you do run shops or any other online business on the long term, SEO is a key part of the whole cake.

At the end of the day, you do look at your revenue versus the whole cost package. If you raise the % of your (more or less free of cost) SEO traffic step by step, it opens up budget in your calculation, that you can use for other, new traffic sources or tests.

So: PPC & SEO is the winner ;-) (+all other traffic sources that pay into the pot of gold after testing)

It is possible to calculate your business all on PPC, but you have to realize, that y<ou are very dependent on the development of CPCs etc. Example: Googles decision to trash the righthandside ads and only have the 4 top spots => a big impact on cost for all Adgroups where you are below ad position 4. Risky.

cheers gE

Both have costs attached to it. PPC costs money whereas SEO involves time and effort. It depends on what suits you. If you have time optimize for rankings with SEO, and if you have money, spend it on PPC.

However, this is where most get it wrong - whatever the source of traffic, you have to master it. Just master one source, whether it be a form of free traffic like content marketing or paid traffic like Bing or Adwords.

Why is always PPC vs SEO? Those are just channels and both are good when you use them properly.

As I remember first organic position get 50% more clicks when you combine SEO and PPC, second 81% and third 96% more clicks (combined).

Each of those channels has their own purpose. For example, you cant invest money in SEO before you invest it in PPC. WHY? Because PPC finds you keywords that works for you, so later on you could invest only in profitable keywords. That is just one example whay SEO and PPC best works together.

Ur welcome

In initial stage of the business, I will go with SEO as I can not afford huge amount to spend on PPC. You need to do more testing to understand the SEO strategy. Once you start generating sales and can afford PPC is certainly a very good way for lead generation. So as time goes you need to use mix of both. Good luck

PPC should be done for short time until your business gets popularity. Once it has been done, try to start your SEO campaign. SEO gives you long lasting result on search engine result pages. Whereas, PPC gives you top position for time being on search engine result pages.

I have to agree with him on this - unless you are a small local mom and pop store. But for medium to large sized companies, he's bang on the money.

SEO is quite slow, not easy to scale ... and whenever Google decides to roll out a new algo change it can wipe out months of hard work, time and resources that were spent on ranking your site naturally in a highly competitive market. PPC is a much more reliable source to guarantee a steady flow of new customers.

However, if you are a local business (i.e. Jane's Cupcake Shop in a small City), it doesn't hurt to get your site ranked naturally to save a bit on advertising costs and maximize exposure. Chances are there isn't much competition anyway, so getting ranked for your business will be quite easy and more resilient to an algo change.

But for anything on a larger scale in a competitive industry I would most definitely stick to PPC - besides, all my traffic comes from PPC as well

Nick

I would choose ppc over seo any time. SEO there is no guarantee. While you may lose money with PPC if you are tracking you can at least see the value in your time and investment

I am afraid to say it but the reality is that Google is prominently experimenting with SERP space to make the Ads more and more visible. I won't be surprised if Google introduces Ads for Google Local in near future.

Not quite sure whether to agree with what he says or not. Google has been experimenting quite a lot with SERPs off late. I won't be surprised if they roll out AdWords for Google Local as well.

The last few days I was a hard-core PPC believer.

Kurt just converted me to the SEO religion.

Now I'm a member of two confessions.

Generally, people tend to trust search results more than advertisments so this is where SEO holds an advantage over PPC. The problem with this process is that it can be a long, painstaking process especially if you are trying to rank against a very competitive keyword. If you have money to spend and want immediate results then I suggest you use Pay Per Click, but if you want a long-term sustainable website traffic source then I suggest you use SEO services.

It is proved that both SEO and PPC are vital for a site and for a business. It should be mentioned that PPC is one of the fastest ways to jump-start your business with traffic today and long term SEO is going to bring you the best kinds of traffic and the most qualified leads. That is why most people prefer to use PPC techniques, because it shows an effect immediately.

Thanks everyone!

Would you all say that there's a need for PPC specialists as Adwords I've heard is very hard to master.

I hate the SEO vs PPC debate, for one main reason: there is no correct answer.

What works well for one business isn't going to necessarily work for another.

I cringe when I things like $9 "The Fool-Proof PPC Hack Guide" claiming to have the magic answer. PPC nor SEO is cookie-cutter. You have to test. You have to get your hands dirty. ...and you more than likely have to spend some money.

You aren't going to know whether SEO or PPC is the more attractive option for your business unless you get concrete data and see for yourself.

But, even if you are dead-set on organic traffic, you should still use PPC to help reach your goals. Think of all the time, energy and money it takes to rank for ultra competitive keywords. Now, image after spending months and months working hard, you finally break into the top 3 and start to see massive clicks...but they don't convert. Some keywords will bring in plenty of traffic, but if it isn't converting then it's essentially useless.

You could have saved a lot of time and money by testing your keywords via PPC campaigns first, to see what ones produced the most conversions. Then, you take that PPC data (hard proof) and map out your organic strategy based on your findings.

Leverage PPC and SEO together, but instead of debating whether one is better than the other, simply test for yourself. Don't discredit one or the other because someone on a forum or blog post says one is superior.

I know large brands in the financial space that have ridiculous PPC budgets, but even though they can turn that PPC spend faucet all the way on to suck up all paid traffic, they are using their PPC data to dictate the direction of their organic campaign...then I know some smaller companies that have zero interest in organic traffic and dealing with algorithm shifts -- they work with a tight PPC budget month after month and because of their split testing and optimizing they have been able to slowly scale.

Spend the time and money to learn and understand, undoubtably, what works best for your business/market/location/etc. If you simply rely on someone else to dictate the direction you take you could be leaving a huge opportunity on the table.

As one of those specialists, I can tell you there is a need for GOOD PPC specialists. I can also tell you there is more of a need and I think this need will grow for various reasons. I'm seeing it now and I'm busier than ever.

That is the wrong approach in my opinion. It may work some times but is not a solution for long-term success.

For one thing, if you don't know what your keywords should be, there is a problem there. I can see in some cases such as a translation service where you could discover something about a competitor. But that by itself does not guarantee success. I don't use such services.

Exactly right. Each have their good and bad points. But for a full advertising strategy, you should use both as well as other strategies. Saying SEO is better than PPC or the other way around is like saying that advertising on radio is better than TV. Large companies don't think that way and use both. Yes, one may produce better results than the other for whatever reason (maybe car ads work best on TV for example). But you wouldn't use the same kinds of ads on TV as on radio. You have to take advantage of the medium.

George, there's a reason CPCs in any industry are what they are. You can't get away from it much. If you have, great. That is, you have keywords that are just as relevant and costing you less. But that is extremely rare.

Thing is, lots of advertisers focus on the wrong thing, mainly the cost of a keyword. They neglect the overall marketing strategy. Yes, reducing your CPC by half is nice (and very possible) but don't neglect the other side of that click, that of acquiring the customer.

Take a look at my tag link for an idea of what I do.

If SEO is done right then AdWords just can't compete. I had a music store client who was spending $20k on his AdWords campaign and it was tripling his investment, but that was dwarfed by the sales he was making in SEO which he had more or less spent nothing on. Just years from traditional advertising, having good products at decent prices and general publicity provided a solid natural backlink profile.

Ended up losing that client in the end because my $20k per month PPC campaign was being compared directly to free Organic sales.

If one is going to compare SEO to PPC and look at just the perceived costs, of course PPC is going to lose every time. You can't say SEO is free. There is a cost associated to implementing and maintaining. So to me, the comparison is not a fair one.

But I have to strongly disagree with you that PPC can't compete. Spending $20k a month for a music store and I assume advertised only locally seems awfully high so sounds like maybe it wasn't implemented properly. My clients typically have twice or more the conversion rate for PPC traffic as they do for organic traffic. Once shown the numbers, they realize that PPC has its place and does increase their sales and revenues.

However, PPC holds a slight edge in conversion rates, as paid search results are 1.5x more likely to convert click thrus from the search engine. The SEOmoz article attributes, to the fact that the paid search result's "text and landing page is custom optimized by the advertiser.

PPC is fast - and works if you have deep enough pockets.

PPC can disappear overnight, especially if a competitor decides he wants to spend a lot more than you for any keyword, or set of keywords, that you currently are bidding on.

SEO is long term and will out last PPC.
PPC is a good alternative way to drive traffic along with SEO.
A good site, with good content, in a good niche will be around years from now and still ranking at or near the top, if the SEO is done correctly.

-Jim Furr ><>

Both are very good for ranking, you cant just rely on PPC, you have to do SEO too sometimes.

To me the main advantages of SEO is of course holding a top organic, unpaid search result which provides a lot of exposure and traffic and seems more credible to potential customers.

But SEO takes Time: It can take many months to be noticed by search engines.
Also rankings are susceptible to algorithm updates which can really shuffle the search result, causing organic rankings to fall and months of hard work and money to be flushed down the drain.


On the contrary PPC has many advantages such as immediate results or control over what keywords your ads will be shown, along with the ability to geo-target to control the areas where your search results are seen.


The disadvantages Of PPC are that can be very expensive and you must test extensively and constantly.

This reminds me of a story I was just reading on the internet. It was about how a dude living in the cornfields in OH. He wanted to create a site and make money real quickly. Also he didn't want to spend hours wasting time on SEO. So he used PPC advertising. One in particular was facebook ads. PPC helped him grow his site to 100 Million visitors a month in no time. He was making huge amounts of money with adsense and other networks. The site was at it's peak and the man who owned the site sold it for $100Million. That mans name is Scott DeLong and the site I'm referring to is ViralNova. All that was achieved and he didn't use SEO.

On page SEO is the foundation every website should be built on, having an optimized page to send your PPC visitors to will lessen your expenditure and increase your conversions.

Going through analytics to further optimize a website is still good SEO.

Off page SEO is not what it used to be, I haven't spent any time on the offsite in about 6 years now. It may not be total bollocks, but it is near total bollocks now. The only decent backlinks are the ones you can't get easily or pay for.

SEO is the organic way for get ranked and traffic for your webpages.Once you get top ranked with seo techniques then you automatically get huge traffic or visitors for your website.But it takes time to get ranked with organic way. But Its really helpful for any businesses for get lead and promotions.

First of all both of them are used to get traffic to your web site from Search Engines. In Case with PPC you invest your money and get visitors from SE. In the second case you mostly invest your time (and sometimes money as well). I would say that many webmasters start with PPC and then transform efforts in SEO.

PPC = pay per click. SEO = Search Engine Optimisation. Which should you invest in? Both can take investments of both time and money to succeed. If you do both, you can considerably increase your chances of success.

PPC (Pay Per Click) is all about paying for advertising space for specific targeted keywords on search results pages. But make no mistake, there is a great deal of search engine optimization when creating a paid ad campaign.

It all depends. What are your goals, budget & timeline?

SEO Pros & Cons:

SEO often cost less then PPC (if you are using an agency) as there is no ad spend
SEO is a long term strategy, don't expect rapid gains
SEO can be less volatile then PPC
SEO can provide more long term value

PPC Pros & Cons:

PPC can provide rapid short term gains
PPC is often much more expensive due to CPC costs
CPC costs continue to increase as more advertisers become involved
PPC can provide much more focused and targeted results

The following are the differences between SEM an PPC
SEM::

1. It stands for Search Engine Marketing advertising. SEM increases the visibility of the website on the top in the search engines.
2. It takes more time to bring organic traffic by implementing consistent SEM principles.
3. Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Reputation Management are the different marketing techniques of SEM.
4. SEM comes under a paid online marketing.

PPC:

1. PPC stands for Pay Per Click
2. Ads are free to run, but charged per each click.
3. PPC brings your business ads in an easy and on the top of the search engines.
4. Need to set your budget on a daily basis.

This blog will solve your query. SEO Vs. SEM???

Despite comparing these two, it is more advisable that use both in combination. Results will be awesome.

If you want instant traffic and sale and you have good budget Adwords is the best for you. but if you have patience then Go for SEO its takes time but once it done successfully it will gives you revenue for long time.

whether to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization, or naturally ranking high in the organic results) or PPC (Pay-Per-Click ads, the Sponsored Links and purchased ads on a Google search) to get in front of your target.

The main difference between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) is that traffic coming from SEO (organic) is free while traffic generated from PPC is not free (as the name implies you have to pay a cost per click). This is also the reason why you may sometimes see the terms organic search engine listings and paid search engine listings (or Paid Search Advertising PSA).
Both SEO and PPC are part of search engine marketing) which is one of the tools you can use as part of your overall Internet Marketing campaign.

PPC is basically instant SEO.

SEO is only really effective if you get to the top Google page for your keywords, which can be very difficult. If you are not an expert in SEO, you may have to hire an SEO agency, which can actually turn out more expensive than PPC, as you rankings still need to be maintained. With SEO, it takes months to start seeing results, and you may never even get to the top ranks, which means you've wasted a huge amount of time.

However, PPC can get expensive if you need to bring in a large amount of daily clicks. It's more ideal to get to the first page by SEO rather than PPC, but it's also much more difficult and time consuming to do so.

The main difference between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) is that traffic coming from SEO (organic) is free while traffic generated from PPC is not free (as the name implies you have to pay a cost per click)

I think 150k is a big amount, he is actually how much investing don't know but I think for you SEO may be better because its takes some time but gives you best ROI also in google adwords you have to follow many rules and regulations when your product is related to pharmaceutical.

The main difference between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) is that traffic coming from SEO (organic) is free while traffic generated from PPC is not free (as the name implies you have to pay a cost per click).

This is also the reason why you may sometimes see the terms organic search engine listings and paid search engine listings (or Paid Search Advertising PSA).

Both SEO and PPC are part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which is one of the tools you can use as part of your overall Internet Marketing campaign.

Both have costs attached to it. PPC costs money whereas SEO involves time and effort

With regards to boosting movement to your site, you have two essential choices: pay-per-click (PPC) promoting or site improvement (SEO). You can pay for activity utilizing the PPC publicizing programs gave by Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and others

PPC over SEO any day!

I say this because PPC delivers targeted traffic and also the fact that you can control the amount of traffic you are sending.

I think both are most important. when you want early traffic then you should have to go for PPC.

In SEO, you will get free way traffic