Organic SEO vs. PPC (Pay Per Click) – Part One

Even nice web sites need traffic driven to them. This is axiomatic and common sense. Yet there are still web site owners out there who believe a decent, good-looking site will automatically generate tons of traffic.

Well, they might be right if they happen to have dynamite content. Truly exceptional content that impresses the heck out of the search engines, or stuff that will go viral. Otherwise, hoping for “automatic” traffic is wishful thinking.

For how will someone searching by keywords find that web site in the first place, unless it can show up well in search results? True, there are other tools to drive traffic, too (such as e-mail campaigns; article marketing; link building; social media; blogging, etc.). But some of those tools influence search results and rankings only indirectly, or are relatively short-lived in their effectiveness.

We’ll discuss some of those “other tools” in upcoming posts and articles – so be sure to visit us regularly. (You see? Generating interest and curiosity is another way of driving traffic. It’s called content marketing).

But we digress.

Today we’ll start briefly discussing pros and cons of 2 important “traffic drivers”: PPC (mainly by the market leader Google Adwords) vs. Organic SEO. Those who already know may skip the rest. But don’t go far … Come back soon.

Organic SEO is the complex science of optimizing a web site (or web page) for the desired search terms. The purpose is to attract the big search engines’ attention and “esteem”.  Very simply and briefly put, Google will rate a site that’s well optimized as relevant for those terms or keywords, and rank it higher in search results. Such search results usually appear in the middle, the main body of results pages.

Organic SEO requires expert work, patience and monitoring if it is to be successful.

By contrast, PPC is a more direct, and simpler method of attracting attention. Compared to Organic SEO it’s almost a bit crude. Yet it can be very effective. In this scenario the web site owner is an advertiser. She creates search engine ads that link to her web site, and bids for search result placements for those ads. 

The higher the bid, the bigger the likelihood of higher ranking in the ads section (usually on top or on the side). That said, the most effective and relevant keywords have to be researched, evaluated and applied, too. That is a professional task as well.

There can be thousands of “impressions” (that’s the ad’s appearance in the paid search results section, “inviting” to be clicked) but the advertiser will pay the search engine only if the ad gets clicked and thus the website visited.

Obviously, seeing a search result (SEO or PPC) cannot guarantee any clicks. And even if a click happens, it might not convert into sales. Conversions are a science to themselves. We’ll talk about that topic in a different post.

Part Two of this article will discuss the actual pros and cons of Organic SEO vs. PPC. We’ll also try to help you with guidelines which route to take. See you there.

Question? Comments? Challenges?  Reach out to us.  We’re good listeners and are here to help.