Search engine optimisation is considered a form of advertising online since it is one of the best ways for websites to gain traffic. The idea behind it is that a website creates high quality content which is indexed by search engines such as Google. When a web user searches for keywords or a phrase relating to the high quality content, that article will show up on the search results which the web user will likely click on. Search engine optimisation is used in its millions because it is an effective long term solution to gaining contextual traffic online. However, it is sometimes best to understand the pros and cons to a system before using it. For this reason, here are the main benefits and drawbacks to SEO for advertisers.

Pro – SEO is Free

SEO has a major upper-hand to PPC because it is completely free. This means that just about anyone can use SEO to gain traffic online (which is what most bloggers do). But, more importantly, you can experiment with SEO at no cost disadvantage. By this, I mean that with PPC, if you want to experiment with your campaign to make it achieve the highest conversion rate, you would have to put aside part of your advertising budget which will, in essence, be wasted on experimenting different elements within your campaign. With SEO, you can experiment as much as you want and it won’t cost you a single dime.

Con – SEO Does Not Produce Instant Traffic

There are lots of advertising campaigns out there that require instantaneous (or short term) traffic for the campaign to succeed. Unfortunately, instant traffic is just not possible with search engine optimisation. Once you create high quality content, you will then have to wait for it to be indexed by Google and other search engines and that is like saying how long a piece of string it. Sometimes, it could be indexed within hours. Other times, it could be days or weeks. The point is that SEO is not a reliable source of short traffic which means for short traffic, PPC has the upper hand.

Pro – Contextual Traffic

There are not many other sources of traffic out there that can produce just as contextual traffic as PPC. This is because SEO gains clicks from the same traffic as PPC since SEO articles are competing directly against PPC adverts. The great thing about SEO, though, is that the statistics make clear that web users prefer to click on organic links than PPC links (for more information on this, read 12 Useful Facts and Stats About SEO). You can have an organic link show up for a keyword every single time in search engine results that would cost dollars in PPC.

In all fairness, SEO is a great source of traffic that everyone (and I mean every single advertiser) should be using. It does not cost them anything and can give landing pages that boost in traffic they need. It is extremely healthy to have different types of traffic going to a landing page: the best campaigns are those with PPC, social and organic traffic all going to one landing page (as you are increasing the span of your audience).