There will always be a debate amongst advertisers whether pay per click advertising is better than search engine optimisation or the other way round. Each form of gaining traffic has its advantages and disadvantages which ultimately will mean depending on what you are trying to achieve will depend on if you use PPC or SEO. For example, I could say straight away that SEO is looks at more long term aims than PPC. Therefore, advertisers that want instant results will look for PPC. However, PPC can also be long term if you so wish for it to be. Below are the main reasons why pay per click advertising is better than SEO no matter what your objectives are.

There Is More Control In PPC

It is true that you have the most control in PPC when it comes to directing traffic – nothing can top it. You can control the type of people coming to your landing page, the amount entering, the cost for bringing them there, the way you bring them there and so on… The list does not end!

Have a look at SEO. You may think you have control, but in reality, you don’t. You are relying on the fact that search engine traffic is consistent in providing the same type of traffic to your landing page. As well as this, you don’t have control over exactly how much traffic is going to your landing page. For advertisers that need instantaneous traffic or even consistent amounts of long term traffic, PPC is the way forward. I often look at SEO as a lottery. You cannot guarantee results in SEO and for many advertisers, this is a big problem.

PPC Has Analytical Statistics

Let’s create an example where you are using SEO. How can you determine, fast and easily, how successful your SEO campaign is? The truth is you can’t when compared to PPC. Pay per click programs such as Adwords provide advertisers some of the best statistics to help advertisers see where they are succeeding in their campaigns and where they are failing (so they can improve upon these areas of failure). As well as this, the integration of Google Analytics onto landing pages makes PPC faultless for the number of types of statistics it gives to advertisers.

PPC Is Much More Reliable

As a blogger myself, I find that SEO can be extremely unpredictable due to algorithm changes such as Google Panda. These changes, although for the better, can have devastating consequences to even the best of websites.  As well as this, these continuous updates makes it difficult to predict what Google and other search engines will do next. One day, your article and landing page may be bringing thousands of visitors. Another day, it could be tens of visitors. Google’s updates are only meant to affect the websites that copy web content and have poor content. Therefore, the chances are your SEO campaign will not be affected. However, I say ‘the chance’ is that you won’t be affected. This means there is still a chance that you might (be it extremely small) be affected. For some advertisers, this low chance is still too high risk.

Logically, it makes sense for Google to create updates that affect SEO campaigns. Google earn 97% of their money through Google Adwords and PPC alone. If they can encourage advertisers using SEO campaigns to switch to PPC, then they will make even more money through Adwords. Therefore, it makes sense to create updates that will affect SEO campaigns inparticularly.