The age old debate of SEO vs PPC makes one think in which one should the businesses spend their online marketing budget. Is it SEO or is it PPC or both? Let’s look into it.

When we talk about online marketing, we look for all the ways through which we can market our products/services online to enhance the web presence. Search engine optimization and pay per click marketing are two main methods to advertise your brand on internet. But, it’s difficult to say which one is better.

Search engine optimization is an important thing for any website or business. In terms of sales, leads and results, SEO is the best way for your website. It has many advantages over pay per click marketing. But, we can’t ignore pay per click marketing as well. For long term results, SEO is better than pay per click marketing as it can be done until your budget exceeds.

Do you have a new website? If yes, then the only way to get immediate leads is pay per click marketing. Search engine optimization takes too much time to improve the rank of your website on SERPs. Hence, the only way to appear as the top search result on Google, for the keywords used, is pay per click advertising. Also, to get maximum leads/sales, pay per click marketing is important. We have discussed organic SEO and pay per click marketing below in term of visitors, clicks, results, costs and branding.

According to survey and studies, a few people want to click on paid links. Rather than clicking on paid ads, users believe in organic search results. According to a survey, users are up to six times more likely to click on the first few organic results than any of the paid results. Only 30 % users click on paid listings where 70% users click on organic listing.

Pay per click marketing is good for businesses which has high budget. For PPC advertising, one should have good budget. In PPC advertising, cost of clicks depends upon  your website’s niche and country where you want to show your ad. But, in search engine optimization your website will be visible on SERPs in many countries without any cost.

Pay per click advertising is better than organic search engine optimization for branding. Facebook also allows you to advertise your products/service on pay per click basis. Thus, through advertising your Facebook page on per click basis, you can increase the number of fans of your Facebook page.  This can help you in branding your products/services. When it comes to branding, PPC advertising is better than organic SEO.

As I’ve discussed earlier in this article, the results from pay-per-click advertising are immediate. On the other hand, it takes months to appear as top results on search pages using search engine optimization. Hence, PPC marketing is better for businesses which are planning to initiate their advertisement on internet or planning to run their businesses for a particular span of time. But for long term business search engine optimization is best. An amalgamation of both, PPC and SEO, is required to achieve the set targets successfully.