SEO vs. Pay Per Click: what is the most effective way to generate traffic?

When it comes to web marketing, increasing traffic into a website requires one to strategize by using either natural clicks or the paid clicks.

Before making a decision on a strategy that best suits your business, it is important to understand and comprehend the performance of Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click.

Search Engine Optimisation involves putting your website to position higher in normal search results for intended keywords on Google and Yahoo, which are considered to be the main search engines (West 2012).

Conversely, Pay Per Click is all about paying for marketing space for particular keywords on search results pages (Mangani 2004).

SEO is considered to be a long-term investment in marketing since it does not produce results immediately and getting positioned in search engines means your site has a lot of traffic and commands massive followers across the internet (Evans 2007). This usually comes after hard work and after investing in a lot of time.

On the other hand, PPC works fine with sites that perform a good quality job of changing traffic into sales (Kwon 2011).

SEO that takes time before you see results and SEO companies spend about 15% of their online advertising budget, unlike PPC companies that spend 85% (Fjell 2010).

SEO has the benefit of delivering long lasting results and a well-conducted SEO promotion takes a long time to die away than the one conducted by a PPC campaign (Ledford 2009). Natural search engines have the command of improving a website with a continuous flow of traffic for a long time. In the case of PPC, after depletion of money in marketing, the search grading stops (O’Connor 2009).

In conclusion, SEO is the most effective method of website marketing since its costs less and once it has been optimized and designed properly it has a long lasting impression in a business.

SEO has the capability of creating a loyal customer base since internet users rarely go through pages of search engines (Audet and Dennis 2006).

For this reason, the more people visit your website, the more potential clients you are likely to attract and retain.

References

Audet, C. and Dennis Jr, J. E. (2006) 'Mesh Adaptive Direct Search Algorithms for Constrained Optimization'. SIAM Journal on Optimization 17 (1), 188-217

Furnell, S. and Evans, M. P. (2007) 'Analysing Google Rankings through Search Engine Optimization Data'. Internet Research 17 (1), 21-37

Fjell, K. (2010) 'Online Advertising: Pay-Per-View Versus Pay-Per-Click with Market Power'. Journal of Revenue & Pricing Management 9 (3), 198-203

Kwon, C. (2011) 'Single-Period Balancing of Pay-Per-Click and Pay-Per-View Online Display Advertisements'. Journal of Revenue & Pricing Management 10 (3), 261-270

Ledford, J. L. (2009) SEO Search Engine Optimization Bible.: John Wiley & Sons

Mangani, A. (2004) 'Online Advertising: Pay-Per-View Versus Pay-Per-Click'. Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management 2 (4), 295-302

O’Connor, P. (2009) 'Trademark Infringement in Pay-Per-Click Advertising'. Contemporary Research in E-Branding, 148-160

West, A. W. (2012) 'Search Engine Optimization'. in Practical HTML5 Projects. ed. by Anon: Springer, 357-376