Here we go again, another blog article written about the positives and negatives of Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click Marketing. At SEO Consult we have two specialised departments that deal with both industries, so it’s easy to give a balanced argument to which is more beneficial for a given website.

I will approach this bearing three aspects in mind; industry, content and budget. These factors are considered, otherwise it would turn into another rant about how expensive PPC is and how slow SEO is.

Firstly industry dependant, PPC can sometimes be substantially more cost-effective. If you’re product is high profit, you will be able to afford a relatively high cost per conversion and therefore intermittent advertising would be enough as any investment made would be recouped. SEO has long timeframes, and therefore requires continued investment so may not be as appropriate.

On the other hand if you have a niche product and need to make a lot of sales to make a profit, optimising your most important pages (home and main products) then SEO is far better and would be better for brand building, leading to more returning customers and thus making more sales.

If your website has little or no content then it will never succeed in the organic search results, with PPC as long as you have relevant landing pages it really doesn’t matter what you have or don’t have on the page. Even if you have just a one page site, theoretically you can still have a successful PPC program. This is again a short term measure, if your CPC (Cost per click) is continually rising, as we have seen with nearly all Google advertising, then SEO becomes more of a realistic option.

Finally budget. Ultimately, if you have a large or unlimited budget then you can afford to undertake both Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimisation. Rationally this is not the case for 99% of UK businesses – you need to truly evaluate the long term strategy and estimations of your company. Search Engine Optimisation is an investment which done correctly will never be wasted, more importantly once you achieve top listings you won’t drop out if you can’t afford to continually pay for it. With PPC once you stop, you drop.

For a free SEO quote please complete our simple Free SEO Analysis form.

Get Involved