Instead of SEO, PPC and Not Sure, you should add Both Equally Important to your survey.

> The keyword research would take about 5 days

It took you five days to do keyword research?? I'm all for taking your time and do a good job but five days?

Both SEO and PPC have their pros and cons. Obviously, with PPC you have a monetary expenditure but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. SEO takes longer (a time expenditure, money too because time = money) and you can't be sure if and where you'll rank or for how long. PPC can help you test much faster and target keywords you don't rank for organically. Having that data will help with doing better SEO.

Put Both in there and I'll answer it.

Nice comparison, it is really hard to chose which one is best. But for me I think that SEO is the best choice. Now granted, when you are first starting a site and have a hot product then PPC makes the most since in terms of getting your company known. But overall I think SEO has the upper hand due to the fact that you can rank on mutiple search engines in short a period of time provided that your seo skills are up to par.

You can lose alot of money testing different tactics with ppc, whereas with seo you can simply swap out anchors and possibly get the same results. It might be a little more time consuming but it doest cost you or client a dime to find out.

No comparison. SEO wins hands down!

Thanks Me John, but can you elaberate on the reason why you think SEO wins hands down.

I think, SEO experts are better than PPC experts. Being a SEO guy, you focus on tweaking your website for better results, you provide useful information in the form of articles/content/etc.

You also work deligently in making your website compliant to search engine requirements. You work on your website to make it user friendly and search engine friendly. You create associations with other webmasters in the same field. You do lots of link exchanges with quality websites. You make use of social networking engines.

You do all that, you as a webmaster, should be doing to create a buzz which strengthens backlinks to your website. All that done without spending too much money. I believe, being a SEO expert is better than being a PPC expert.

> whaen it was there I tried everything to get it to convert

That's the problem with SEO. People want a high natural ranking, I understand that. But to do so, your sales pitch often takes an unnatural look which hurts conversion. I'm sure you've seen listings which are nothing more than keyword stuffing. Same with the page's body. I once told a PPC client that I believed his new SEO efforts, although may make more of his pages rank on the first page, would hurt his conversions. I was right. His SEO guy just stuffed the page with keywords and the flow was just broken, there was really no sales message and sometimes it just didn't make much sense. It got him on page one all right but conversions went from about 5% down to 1% on both natural clicks and PPC.

So it's a balancing act. Do you want the high rankings at the expense of conversions, which might also affect your click rate or do you want your copy to sell at a higher rate at the expense of losing natural rankings? Myself, I'd take higher converting pages any time. Try to rank high organically, supplement with PPC. In other words, write your copy for humans, not search engines. The humans are the ones with the money.

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Ametis, PPC doesn't have to be expensive. In fact, it can sometimes be very cheap. It will be expensive if you cannot monetize properly and that goes back to what I said about writing your page for humans, not search engines. There is a good way and a bad way to make your sales pitch. If it's bad, PPC will look expensive. Even SEO will be disappointing. How many times do we see a thread in here starting with "I get lots of visitors but I'm getting no sales"?

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I use BOTH every effectively, and would never want to eliminate either in favor of the other. Both strategies are critical to my success.

Why don't read by the big G it self:

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/seo-starter-guide-now-available-in-40.html

Hope you like this link

Kevin

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> I think it's more important to get the SEO side of things right first and then run a PPC campaign.

That's where I, and I suspect a few others here, would disagree with you, Dave. I say take advantage of being able to test many different things quickly with a PPC campaign first. You'll have loads of real data such as search patterns and numbers, trigger words in ads that get higher click rates and higher conversions. Starting with SEO, you're just guessing at all this stuff.

jigsawguy is right, they both have their place even in driving traffic though they are different in many ways but similar in others. But I like Don's analogy of which leg is better. Don, next time a question like this comes up again (and it will), I'm going to use this.

Checking the results so far, SEO is ahead 13-4 with one not sure. Can't say I'm surprised because the prevailing attitude is that paying to get traffic is bad.

Which makes me wonder that if you had to pay for SEO, say pay $100 a year for the privilege of being indexed, and asked the same question, which one would people pick? How 'bout it Malachi? Care to create another poll?

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i think both are important but SEO looks Best

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> but SEO looks Best
Don't know what you mean by that, webdaisy.

Bryan is right about how you want to run your business. But I think you've got the percentages reversed, that is if you use PPC all the time, not just to get started. I think you'll put (or should put) more time and resources towards PPC than SEO.

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Agree, who's going to say no to free traffic. I'm not saying to stop doing SEO completely and do only PPC. I'm saying that even a good SEO person can't rank high for all the keywords, all the time on all the search engines. This means you're not reaching all your potential customers. Use PPC to reach them. It's not a question of SEO vs PPC. It's maximizing quality visitors and maximizing sales at lowest possible cost by whatever means. If SEO happens to get you 50% of your visitors, all the better, that offsets your PPC costs. But if you don't use PPC, you miss out on that other 50%.

If SEO gets me 10k visitors per year and 500 sales at $20 for a $10k profit, I don't mind spending $5 per sale to get an extra 10k visitors. That would be 1000 sales, $20k gross less $5k for PPC = $15k profit, an extra $5000 in my pocket. In fact, I bet PPC would get you more traffic than SEO and convert better.

If you avoid one in favor of the other, you are most likely reducing your own potential profits. Both should be a part of most online marketing arsenals.

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I'll go with SEO, free of cost and is very reliable if done right.

Malachi, you can outsource PPC too. Let someone else do the tracking for you. Lots of people to do this on this board, myself included.

As for a new poll, like I originally said, you need to have the option of "Both". For a similar poll with the stipulation that both have a monetary output.

The question would be along the lines of "If SEO cost the same as PPC, which one would you choose? Which to you would be more important to spend time and money on?". Choices are SEO, PPC, Both, Don't know.

PPC and SEO have different purposes, so it really depends what you're looking for.

You can easily set up a PPC campaign to test the market and not spend heaps of time optimizing a site to only find out the keyword your targeting was useless!

They are both fantastic, but in the long run I think SEO trumps PPC. There's less messing around with irritating Google Slaps.

J

Of course they are both viable, in essence they are doing the exact same thing: making your site visible on the front page of search engines. Now, there are numerous differences in how that is achieved. The main differences being...

SEO takes longer and costs exponentially less.
PPC provides instant results at a cost.

Pick your poison.

seo for long terms & ppc for short terms.

i like seo is free

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I think that they are both different. For me there are two options:

1) Target microniches via SEO and build up a network of 100 or so siteseach bringing in a small income (which adds up)

2) Target the monster keywords with huge search volume via PPC that you would never stand a chance of ranking in the organic listings. More risky if you're not careful. However, just a single profitable campaign could result in a full time income.

Cheers,

Andy

I think this really depends on your niche. Each niche can be highly competitive with low or high cpcs. There really is no right answer.

no definate answer for that ..I think SEO it much powerful then a PPC campaign but it may a year or more to rank for a high competitive keyword and with PPC you can get some quick results and make some instant money

If we were going by the stats 60% of readers say Seo is better than PPC. Is ther any PPC lovers that can add some spice to to pot.

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Hello Malachi ,

Testing conversion with PPC can give you a fast answer ... If SEO should be done?

This will give you the best of both worlds

Best Wishes ... Ron

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