Website Traffic: PPC or SEO?

admin    Search Engine Optimization     bing, google, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, yahoo

If you have a website than you already know that it is not just about having the best looking site. If you do not have website traffic than your website might as well be located on Mars, nobody knows how to get to it. When it comes to any online venture the first thing you need to consider is how will I get traffic to website. If you do not have a plan for driving visitors to your site everything else just does not matter.

So how do you get traffic to your website? Let’s take a look at the two most common and popular ways (pay per click & seo) that webmasters are using to drive traffic to their website and go through the pros and cons:

Pay Per Click

Pay per click is basically paying the search engines when somebody clicks on your ad and they land on your website. There are many services that you can purchase pay per click traffic from but really only the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, & Bing) at this point drive any volume of traffic unless you are doing media buying and that typically is reserved to for the websites with large marketing budgets.

If you are not familiar with pay per click marketing than you are bidding on a keyword and when a person types in that keyword into the search engines your ad will show up.

Pros:

- You can drive a lot of traffic to your website and can quickly determine which keywords will perform best for your website and service.
- You can start a ppc campaign and have traffic flowing to your website within 5 minutes.
- You can target the website or landing page based on the keyword so that you can get the highest conversion rate possible.

Cons:

- Depending on the keywords the bidding can be expensive to outragous.
- If you do not carefully monitor which keywords are converting the best you can be throwing money down the drain.
- If you do not have a marketing budget pay per click may not even be an option.
- People are less likely to click on pay per click ads.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization or seo is optimizing your website for keywords that are relevant to your offering. Your goal with search engine optimization is to display your website on the first page of the search engines for your keyword terms and you really want to be in the top 3.

Pros:

- Once you acheive ranking for a keyword you can realize a good deal of targeted traffic to your site if you have done your homework and know the keywords that will convert the best with the highest amount of searches.
- Once Google has gained trust in your website ranking for terms, particularly long-tail keywords becomes a little bit easier.
-You do not have to spend a dime for organic traffic.
- People are more likely to click on websites that appear in the organic listings.

Cons:

- Seo can take a long time depending on the age of website and the keywords that you are focusing on.
- You cannot always be certain what it will take to rank for specific keyword terms. Since the search engines hold the algorithms you will never be 100% certain that you are taking the correct actions to rank for your terms.
- Can be very labor intensive to acheive the rankings that will actually turn into traffic to your site.

Both pay per click and search engine optimization can be very effective in driving traffic to you website and if you can afford it using both is a great idea. You actually are spending money on both methods but seo is more sweat equity and ppc is money that is straight our of you wallet.

Please keep in mind that although both have their advantages and disadvantages once you stop your ppc campaignthe traffic stops. If you seo your website correctly the traffic will continue to come to your site as long as you maintain your rankings.

Is ppc or seo better? It really depends on your goals, if you are looking more long term and you are patient than seo is probably the best option but if you are into instant gratification than ppc is probably better suited for you.