PPC v SEO

Pay per click v SEO

In modern marketing world the most talked marketing strategies are search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click advertising.  A firm has to give much concern in deciding on which strategy to follow in promoting their company on line. Every company tries to drive traffic to their websites but which one is the best way is the question asked by every investor today. To answer this we need to know what is ‘Pay per click’ and what is SEO.

When you search any of the major search engines you will see two types of results. The first results displayed on many sites are pay-per-click ads, also known as “Sponsored Results.” Just as the name suggests, these ads are paid for by the advertiser each time a visitor clicks on them. The advertiser who bids the highest amount for the search term will show up first. Organic results are organized by the search engines' search algorithm (computer program) and their ability to catalog the content on the web (also called “spidering” or “crawling”). These results are not directly paid for like pay-per-click advertising but often businesses invest a lot of time in optimizing their site to show up at the top of the results.

A common value-driven strategy behind PPC and SEO is to try to achieve natural listings for as many of your keyword terms as you can, focusing first on the terms that are the most expensive to purchase as pay-per-click. Using this model you will achieve broad coverage with natural SEO and can use PPC sparingly as a method to supplement areas where you haven’t been able to gain good natural ranking. Additionally, external sources have shown that conversion rates are often higher among natural listings vs. PPC because buyers trust natural listings to return the best results for their search, not the highest paid.

Another advantage of SEO is that visitors that find you through organic search results are totally free but in PPC company has to pay for each customer visit and in most case every visitor is not a buyer. Some visitors may remember your site and come back again, but overall when you stop paying, the visitors stop coming.

Besides, the amount of competition for those top 10 ad spots is growing every day.  This can only drive the cost per click up over time. But the overall goal is to get the best coverage for the lowest cost per click. So Pay per click is useful in getting quick visitors response but if every visitor is not turned into customer the firm will suffer financially. But if a firm use SEO to gain top position in the search result, than they need not to think about money.

So we can say that Organic search results are considered to be much more reliable than PPC. Survey shows that roughly 4 out of every 5 internet users will click on natural search results before they click on PPC. In other words, 80% percent of internet searchers will click on a natural search result prior to or instead of a sponsored listing. So it is best if a firm uses SEO instead of pay per click.