Organic SEO Vs PPC

PPC and SEO

Pay Per click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two of the main techniques to generate visits on your website.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the approach where you bid for the position in search results which are sponsored.

1. higher the bid, higher the position
2. higher the competition, higher the bid

In principal, it is very straight forward. You pay for the position you wish to be and you have a greater control in terms of spending etc.

Organic SEO: Here you try to optimize your web pages around a set of keywords which you feel are suitable to your category. Once search engine crawlers indexes your website and all the pages then your ranking / listing starts appearing in the organic search results for the keywords you have targeted.

So which one of the two is better?

Organic SEO

• ROI from organic SEO is substantially better than PPC
• Organic SEO pays good in long run
• The top positions of search engine results are not for sale. You can get there through organic SEO only
• The CTR of organic listings are higher usually
• The conversion of organic listing is also higher (lead / sales)
• Organic SEO does not require regular maintenance once SEO is done perfectly and is refined for few iterations
• There is no recurring cost associated with SEO
• There is nothing like “click fraud” as you are not paying per click in organic SEO
  

PPC

• PPC gives you instant traffic
• PPC gives you targeted traffic as you can define a set of keywords for which you need traffic
• Results can be measured in PPC programs
• Marketing strategies can be formulated based on PPC as a tangible forecast of clicks is
  available over a period of time
• PPC requires professional management once you attain a certain level of spend as maintaining
• ROI is very important. An inefficiently managed PPC program can make you loose hundreds of dollars in one night !!
• PPC usually is second most cost effective form of web marketing (After organic SEO)
• PPC campaigns requires recurring / ongoing management
• There are chances of loosing money due to click fraud but most of the major search engines have placed mechanisms to check this.

Final Take: For any website an optimum balance and mix of PPC campaigns and organic SEO is must as they can generate quality traffic if managed properly. PPC gives instant traffic and can be a good source to generate traffic in long run too.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp