The age-long debate as to PPC vs SEO is still a big question asked by many marketers. Pay per click advertising has some benefits over search engine optimization that make it the preferred choice of traffic generation for some situations, whilst the same can be said for SEO over PPC. With this, here are some situations when is it better to use PPC over SEO and vice versa.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising, as its most basic form, is a way of gaining contextually targeted traffic through displaying adverts above organic search results on search engines or in display adverts on publisher websites. You pay only once the web user clicks onto your advert and is directed to your chosen landing page.

The traffic can be targeted very specifically, such as using demographic, age, keywords (niche, negative etc.), type of device and much much more.

For this reason, here are some examples of when it is best to use PPC:

• Short term traffic – This is quite vague. However, if you want to gain a lot of traffic for the short term (which I would generally say is under 6 months), then PPC is your best bet. The great thing about PPC is that you gain traffic/results as soon as you let your campaign go live.
• Reaction marketing – This is a term, I guess, I have made up. However, there are a lot of marketers out there that look to gain traffic through taking advantage of stories happening, real-time, in the world. For example, after a political vote, a lot of advertisers make use of PPC based on the result of the election etc. With this, PPC is very quick and adaptive to capitalize on such events that can happen quickly.
• Counteract competition – The great thing about PPC is that you are not bound to use certain keywords to target. You can choose whatever keywords you want. This makes PPC a brilliant way to take traffic away from your main competitors, through targeting your competitor’s brand names. For example, Ferrari could target ‘buy Lamborghini’ to try and steer traffic to buying a Ferrari instead. Not only do you gain high quality traffic, you also hinder the performance of your competitor too, making it a win-win situation.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a way of creating a website with high quality content to rank high on organic search engine results, namely Google. Here are some examples of when it is best to use SEO:

• Long term traffic – If you want to gain consistent amounts of traffic for the long term (6+ months), then it better you use SEO, since it will be more cost efficient the longer you need traffic.
• Tight on a budget – Although PPC is generally very good value for money, SEO can be done at a very low budget, or even free, for that matter.
• Because of ‘advertiser’s block’ – Some web users look at adverts and block themselves from even digesting the content because they know they are adverts. This can never happen with SEO, making the engagement rate potentially far higher than that of PPC.