You need to do maths in every case. Here's an approximate way how you can do this How to split your budget between SEO and PPC | PPC Hero®

Well, the thing is you can do SEO with basically minimal costs. It takes time, but it's completely manually doable. You don't need any tools, you can write the content by yourself etc.

Of course, it will take a lot of time, but it won't cost you much. You can speed up the process by buying scraper tools (only for data), by getting spyglass/ahrefs subscription, getting a decent VA etc.

PPC is basically the opposite. You can get your results way more faster, but it will also cost you a lot more. IMHO, if you don't have free funds for just "burning & testing" then there's no point to try Adwords. I would say save at least $5k before you dive into Adwords.

I remember my first campaign on Adwords. I spent approx 4k on the first month, while I got back only 2k - it was purely testing, getting knowledge etc - I knew that I won't get a positive ROI just so fast since I was a semi-rookie.

The second month was better, I was already breaking even. I tweaked my campaigns/ads/tracked even more.

On the 3rd month I already got a decent ROI and decent $$$ which I quickly re-invested to get even more clicks. It's extremely exciting while SEO might be boring as hell (maybe it's just me).

Anyway, stick with SEO unless you have a lot of money and time to burn & learn the basics of PPC/adwords.

It depends completely on your skill set.

• If you aren't incredibly familiar with SEO, it's going to cost you a lot of money to become so.
• If you aren't very familiar with PPC, it's also going to cost you a lot of money to learn the ropes.

Unfortunately the question is a bit like 'How long is a piece of string?'

The short answer is both, I've done a more detailed post about it here: SEO versus PPC - IM Ninja - IM Ninja

In most of the cases SEO can be more cost effective compare to PPC as PPC always costs you money and also a low budget in this won't give you any significant return back.

Both SEO and PPC can get you on the front page of the search engines in front of your desired audience. But both have pros and cons. Well known SEO resource SEOmoz, recently published an article by the team at Enquisite evaluating the potency of SEO & PPC.
This article discusses that, organic results are almost 7-8 times more likely to be clicked on than paid search results. That is likely attributed to searchers gradually learning the difference between organic and sponsored results, and recognizing that organic results are typically the more respected resource. However, PPC holds a slight edge in conversion rates, as paid search results are 2 times more likely to convert from the search engine.

Both can burn you if you don't know what you're doing. I wasted a lot of money in my earlier years with PPC.

I lost 10.000's of dollars on PPC and Media Buys, maybe not lost directly but it turned out be a break-even thing.

If I had spend that money on a solid company that provides SEO services I would've gotten that traffic and even more for a long time to go (back then I had no clue about SEO, talking about 8 years ago) and be able to turn a good profit instead of breaking-even.

I think PPC can work best for ecommerce sites when you have a huge collection in a certain niche, if you only have certain brands/models you can lose a lot of money as people might not find what they're looking for (that was kind of my problem back then).

As well as picking keywords too wide and not focusing enough on Geo location but that aside as I also delivered nation wide and got quite a few online orders coming in.

Right now I feel I can literally dominate that market with SEO and make good money, however an offline business kills all of your freedom so I chose not to and drop shipping isn't really available, I already talked with many old supplies and they considered it not worth it as they already have a good presence their selves on the web.

"If they wouldn't have found me, they would have found them" is kind of the theory of most wholesalers or large (self importing) web shops.

SEO is more cost effective and better in the long run if you get it done right. I do all my own SEO and spend money advertising on Facebook and buying banner ad placements on niche related websites.

Always start with SEO in my opinion.

SEO is for long term traffic and may cost less (or even use free methods for this purpose). But for PPC, you may be getting some targeted traffic fast, but not in a long term basis and may be costing you too much money.

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I would say its entirely keyword dependent. For someone just starting out and trying to figure out the ropes of Internet Marketing, SEO would be the easiest way to get involved with minimal investment. Most, if not all SEO tasks can be learned and applied easily. PPC is something that requires a lot more marketing knowledge from the very get go.

PPC's true strengths are its speed and expansiveness. With a PPC campaign, you can be on the first page for a multitude of targeted terms within a day. However, the terms can cost anywhere from pennies to many dollars per click; also, for a PPC campaign to be done correctly, it's usually best to hire a firm that can manage it full time. This can mean that PPC campaigns can get very expensive, very quickly - especially when done correctly.

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If I was running a blog or something on that line, I'd be thinking of doing SEO and other ways of generating traffic (social media marketing, comment posting on blogs and forums and social bookmarking/PR)
But given the condition that I had a newly launched ecommerce/affiliate website, I'd definitely try PPC.
Paid traffic is OK but you need to have a strong tool like Exolevel. I'll not waste my money on buying fake traffic.

For me the best way for generating quality traffic in the short and long term is PPC.
If you know how to build your campaigns, you can earn really big amounts!

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From an agency perspective, where this was tested, PPC and SEO complement each other.

The differences were quite significant when combining the two, and we registered 20-30% boost in both organic and paid traffic.

I'd say if you have the proper tools and can give it time, then SEO is the way. PPC may not directly send targeted traffic to your URL. Also, you have soe up to date tools such as SEnukeXCR that can boost your performance, again, over time. Nothing is written in stone, and even PPC can go horribly wrong. I use scrapers but email helps too if you have a bulk emailer with email extractor . If you know what most marketers, publishers, or advertisers know, there is NO instant push button system. Just take your time and it will pay off. Also, Google is changing, but utilizing Google Adsense is a great tool to start earning pennies to dimes to dollars.

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I have considered that high performing PPC advertisement content is an exceptional beginning stage for Meta portrayal tags. I have likewise discovered that antiquated formed long-tail SEO catchphrase is a gold mine concerning finding negative catchphrases for your PPC campaign. PPC could be incredible for seeding content or seeding link bait especially when you can take advantage of news events.

Make use of Best Performing PPC Ad Copy to update Your Organic Content Strategy. I think what works for SEO also works for PPC. Join E-Commerce Feeds into Adwords Results where you can link particular product pages to PPC ads. The notice will emphasize the item with reviews, and will take the client straightforwardly to the item page, where a purchase could be made. This is an extraordinary approach to give your existing e-trade endeavors a help.

Both Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and PPC are used to increase the quality and volume of web site traffic from search engines.But PPC work faster then SEO practices.

I always believed that SEO is way cheaper than PPC, and I do agree that you can seo with minimal cost but it will take more time

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Undoubtedly PPC is costly and SEO is not costly.

If you want to get instant traffic to your website then go for PPC in which you have to pay lot of money.

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