SEO Vs PPC - The Great Debate

[Candice Robins]

Both SEO and PPC are equally important online marketing strategies with different objectives. Successful PPC techniques achieve immediate and direct traffic while SEO involves greater strategy in navigating constant changes in search engine algorithms. Both these practices are essential components of internet marketing and work together to drive relevant traffic.

[donovanjames786]

Originally Posted by johnnylew

I have seen a few posts on people advising on getting away from CPC and focus on SEO. Comments like, your wasting money/effort on PPC when you can get free traffic with SEO.

Dont get me wrong. Website owners have to invest in SEO efforts whenever they create a page on their site & this can never stop. HOWEVER, how many of you have not devoted any time to CPC chasing / hoping / maybe even praying that your time spent on optimizing a page will pay off with the number one result in the SERP? More so, how many of you got it! There you are number one today, uh oh wait a minute, where is my number ranking a month later? Google, Yahoo, Bing .... reindexed and your number 5 or worse.

You have to combine SEO with PPC to be successful, to keep a constant flow of traffic you have to have PPC, otherwise all your eggs are in the SERP basket and you could be one new algorythum change away from no traffic.

Now here is the great thing that ties your efforts together. Do all those great things for SEO (proper page title, headline, content ...) and if your doing it correclty when you link your Adwords Ad to that page for the keywords you've chosen, you should immediatley have a good Quality Score. SEO Optimization and PPC do go hand in hand.

Keep striving for top organic results - we do! but we put much more effort into a sure thing PPC where we know we will get Page one showings over hoping that over time we get organic page one rankings.

Agree with you mate! According to me PPC following and SEO following SMO is the key to success. Its the way to have targeted visitors along with high search engine rankings.

[accurate.cygnet]

SEO is a long term process, PPC gives instant results. Organic search is believed to be considered more trustworthy by viewers.

[hannahsmith]

I am in favor of SEO, because apart from the reasons you all have mentioned there is one other reason which makes SEO better then PPC, and that is paying less for promoting your business.
SEO helps people in finding some useful information about your business through articles and blogs, which can not be done by only advertising.
But we can also not ignore the fact, that if a business is new, it will take long time to rank of Google by using SEO, in this case you can use advertising which will benefit your business instantly.

[accurate.cygnet]

Originally Posted by hannahsmith

I am in favor of SEO, because apart from the reasons you all have mentioned there is one other reason which makes SEO better then PPC, and that is paying less for promoting your business.
SEO helps in letting people find some useful information about your business through articles and blogs, which can not be done by only advertising.
But we can also not ignore the fact, that if a business is new, it will take long time to rank of Google by using SEO, in this case you can use advertising which will benefit your business instantly.

PPC is better if your business is seasonal. It is for a few months. If you want to market it online. Do you think organic SEO would help you make it famous and reach among the potential customers in a few months time efficiently???

[hannahsmith]

With my previous comment i was just not focusing the seasonal business, but i was targeting all kind of businesses.
In last lines of my article i said that yes if you want to popular your business for small time period or your business is not available for all the seasons then PPC is better.
I just mean that advertising your business on Google is not enough, you also have to make public relationships over the web, and this can only be achieved through SEO.

[ZeroCo]

Do both if you can. Nice thing about PPC is you don't have to worry about an algorithm change affecting your business. Build a business based just on SEO and you could be asking for trouble later if something changes. Much better to be diversified with different sales channels.

Nice thing about PPC for sites just starting out is you'll also learn a lot from PPC that you can use for SEO. If you are turning a profit on some long-tail keywords through PPC, the data will dictate you go after some SEO rankings on that keyword. You know you will get results and even how much.

You'll also be able to test and optimize your site quickly to convert better with PPC...and as your SEO traffic starts to build, all that testing you did via paid search will make your organic search convert better.

The key to all of that is tracking...tracking...tracking. You need to now your ROI for every keyword you are spending money on so that you can adjust and optimize accordingly.

[accurate.cygnet]

Yeah Doing both is a great idea. After penguin updates...It seems like Google has become SEO unfriendly. However organic searches have still the maximum number of clicks!!

[jasminelane]

SEO’s return on investment will continue to rise long after PPC has peaked. PPC has instant results and can generate visitors as soon as you turn on the taps

[troybroussard]

Originally Posted by Nutty

I would always run PPC on a new website for the first 3 months just to get myself going and to allow me to view more keywords and what will work and what won't

Simone

Yeah, that's a great approach Simone.

People tend to polarize this topic as an "us versus them" approach. But as you've pointed out, the two can help each other.

SEO takes time and the worst thing to find out after achieving your SEO objectives and getting a keyword ranked is that it "doesn't convert". Using PPC or other paid traffic means to first identify the keywords you want to attack is an excellent strategy.

You can spend some money on PPC with no real objective of "making money" with the campaign, but really just to "learn" from it - to find the keywords that convert. Once you have your list of converting keywords you can then split off onto two parallel efforts.

#1 - Refine and optimize your PPC campaign to see if you can get it profitable (not always possible depending upon your budget and resources)

#2 - Launch your SEO campaign targeting those keywords you now know to be effective.

Good stuff... :-)

-Troy