SEO Vs PPC – 3 Ways to Decide Which to Use

There are a variety of ways to drive traffic to your website, and two of the main strategies are search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click ads (PPC). Search engine optimization works in a variety of ways, but the most popular and common method of using SEO is to create content that makes frequent use of particular keywords. The goal of this content is to drive the website to the top of a search engine results page for particular keywords. The reason for this is that the higher the ranking on a search engine, the more likely someone is to visit the site. PPC is the other way that many companies use to generate traffic to their web site. These ads are either text or images that link back to the website, but the website only pays for the ads that people click on, not just impressions of the ads.

When you are looking to drive traffic to your website, you can choose either PPC, SEO or both, but there are circumstances when one works better than the other. Here are some basic ways to tell which strategy you should employ for your site.

Is Your Site New?
When you are starting out with a new website, it is usually better to start off with PPC. The reason is that search engine indexing can take a while, and websites can sometimes take a while to build up search engine rankings. Rather than creating a slew of keyword content and waiting for it to provide traffic, PPC can start generating traffic instantly. Later, you can use information gather from successful PPC ads to generate keyword content to bolster the traffic from the ads.

How Common are Your Keywords?
If you have a website with a rather esoteric focus, or are able to generate SEO content for keywords that do not already have a lot of search engine results, it is a good idea to use SEO. Since you are going to be providing content where there is not already a lot of it, it will be relatively easy to boost your search engine rankings. On the other hand, if your website already has a lot of competition, PPC ads can give you the edge you need over competing websites. In this situation, PPC ads are less likely than SEO to get lost in a plethora of results, and it can be less expensive to use ads than to attempt to generate the amount of content you would need to build your SEO.

What Type of Site Do You Have?
For a website that is simply an online store, it may be better to simply use PPC ads than to attempt to generate the SEO content needed to improve your search engine rankings. For a specialized site that focuses on a narrow range of products SEO can be quite useful, but if the site in question has a wide variety of products, attempting to generate sufficient SEO content for each item could end up being more expensive than a set of PPC ads. However, a web site that is informational should use mostly SEO content, since it is expected to have a large volume of written content anyway.

Sam is a blogger with a background in marketing and he is also a contributing writer for a company that specializes in fiber optic patch cables.