When it comes to gaining contextual traffic online, there are two main methods advertisers tend to go for. The first and most obvious form is pay per click advertising which, in past articles, I have made clear is an extremely effective way to efficiently pay for highly targeted traffic. As well as PPC, there is another form that advertisers use being search engine optimisation (also know as organic SEO traffic). This is by naturally creating a well optimised website with great content so that when web users search for a phrase related to your content, they will see your website first on the list of search page results.

However, which form of traffic-gaining should advertisers use? In this article, I will look into which is better out of SEO and PPC and if you should use one of them, neither of them or in fact both of them to create synergy-like results.

SEO is Free

The great advantage to SEO is that is is completely free to do. You can become organically number one for search phrases just by making quality content. Compare this to PPC which, although is a cost-effective solution to online advertising, costs money to create a campaign. Therefore, let’s look at SEO vs PPC financially.

What you need to consider is how much it will cost you to make an effective PPC campaign for your market. How much is the average CPC? What is your advertising budget? From this, you will be able to predict the amount of traffic you can gain through PPC. If it not that much, you may want to consider looking into SEO a bit more or aim your campaign at lower competitive keywords such as niche keywords.

PPC is More Consistent Source of Traffic

In the past, it could be argued that SEO is more consistent since once you have that high quality article on the internet, it will continually bring in traffic for, potentially, years to come (unlike PPC which will cost a lot of $$$ to produce the same results).

However, the problem that SEO is facing is the algorithm updates that Google implements into it’s search engine. Although the updates from Google aim to benefit the high quality websites and reduce the traffic of low quality websites, the updates are never perfect with them usually resulting in some of the best high quality websites being affected traffic-wise. This makes it clear that you could have created a great website and made high quality articles to gain highly targeted SEO traffic. However, you will always be under threat from a new update from search engines that could potentially make your traffic go to nothing. With PPC, you will never have this worry since you are controlling your traffic with a budget.

Ultimately, the best advertising campaigns implement both SEO and PPC since by doing this, you can have both of the benefits of SEO and PPC. If you have a tight budget, you can afford to push your efforts on SEO while your cash flow goes back to being positive or if your SEO is faulting for some reason or another, you could boost the traffic that is reaching your website/landing page through PPC. You will find that most advertisers online are using both. By doing this, you are opening your campaign up to more traffic and spreading the risk of the campaign failing too.