Search Engine Optimization is what literally every website evolves around – it is the heart to success online. On 
PPC.org, there is an argument whether to gain traffic it is better to go for paid PPC campaigns or to stick to the cheaper, and the possibly free, option of SEO. Ultimately, it will always depend on your specific situation and factors such as:
- Have you got a budget to use?
- What time frame do you need the traffic by?
- Do you need guaranteed results?
- How contextual and targeted do you need your traffic to be?
- Do you want to direct web users to a specific landing page?
For the majority of situations, PPC might be the best choice to go for. Yes, it is going to be potentially more expensive than SEO. However, with PPC, you are guaranteed results for the budget you set aside to it and the traffic is going to be highly targeted using the features of AdWords such as keyword targeting.
For other situations, SEO might be better if you cannot afford to run a PPC campaign and you want long term results that will last months, if not years.
It can be seen that SEO is the way to go generally unless you really do need short term results fast. However, there is one major problem with search engine optimization that I am baffled about how to overcome.
How to determine how much traffic your SEO efforts will get?
At the end of the day, SEO is going to always be a gamble because you cannot guarantee results.
A way to describe this is by comparing it to a person buying a new economical car. The person has a car that has the potential to be economical. But, at the end of the day, it is not guaranteed to be economical because it will depend 100% on how the person drives it.
Having articles with good SEO has the potential to get good amounts of traffic. However, at the end of the day, this is going to be determined by Google and their search engine algorithm updates which determines how much traffic your articles will get and when.
For website owners such as myself that have a budget set aside to SEO, there is a little bit of faith to SEO: almost as if you are trusting that the traffic will come one day…it will, trust me!
Of course there are tell-tale signs which give a good idea to whether a website is going to have good SEO and benefit from this in the future. For example, if there is a constant increase in traffic as you perform your SEO, it is a good chance this is going to continually increase as SEO has the effect of producing synergy-like results later on into the SEO campaign. However, getting to that stage can be quite nervous, especially when a large budget is being used every month to published articles without any real difference in traffic being generated from those articles.
