SEO or PPC

Written by: Diane | December 9th, 2008

(0, average: out of 5)

There are two types of Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay per Click (PPC), depending on your website it is important to choose the right path to follow when optimising your site.

SEO is aimed to help websites rank higher in the natural, organic results in search engines which are the results shown in the middle of the page. PPC is using adverts to come up on search engines when searched are performed on certain words, sometimes they are shown above the natural results but usually to the side of them.

Depending on your target market and your budget perhaps only one of these forms of SEM will be appropriate for you.

PPC can potentially be more cost effective, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad and therefore those people are already interested in your site and you have a high chance of making a conversion. If you have a high-profit company then you can afford a higher cost-per-click and therefore a higher daily budget.

If you go for an SEO project you will pay for an upfront optimising fee, and you may have to wait longer before seeing results from this. SEO can be seen for more brand building projects and for companies looking for returning customers, rather than just quick sales. A company with lots of content on their website is a great start for SEO, where as if the website is purely built with products then perhaps PPC would be more effective. Once SEO is working and you can see your rankings have improved it is unlikely that they will suddenly drop again, in comparison, if you stop paying for PPC then you will be gone from the results automatically.