Although it has been mentioned many times before, it still needs to be stressed just how important traffic is to a website. Without traffic, to some extent, a website is worthless. Making sure you have sources of traffic to a website is crucial to the success of it. With this, there is an argument to say that there are mainly two types of sources of traffic you could look to invest time and money in: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) [although social media marketing should get a shout out too].

The question that needs to be answered, though, is which one you should choose to use and when – SEO has certain benefits that make it a better option for traffic for certain situations whilst the same can be said about PPC.

When to Use PPC

To describe PPC as simple as possible, it is a way to gain contextual relevent traffic, at a cost, quickly and efficiently.With this, naturally, PPC will work best when time is an issue. Such examples could include:

• Holiday traffic – Gaining traffic during the holiday season is crucial for many businesses, since the traffic that comes to websites during this time has a much higher conversion rate than the rest of the year. Therefore, if you want an extra boost in traffic for the short term, use PPC.
• Reacting to real world events – PPC is effective at giving website owners the freedom to create a PPC campaign within minutes, enbaling them to react real-time to real world events.
• Compete against SEO – If you have poor SEO and your competition is seemingly taking traffic away from you in Google, you can always try to combat this by implementing a PPC campaign targeting keywords that you have poor SEO for against your competition.

When to Use SEO

In one sentence, SEO is the term used to improve the organic ranking of a website, so that the website and articles on the website ranking higher up on search engine results. With this, SEO could be used for the likes of:

• Providing long term traffic – If you are looking to produce traffic for the long term (1+ years), then SEO is the best and most cost-effective road to take for gaining traffic.
•  Timeless content – The problem with some websites, such as news websites, is that the articles are significantly dictated by:
  • When they are published.
  • What the content is about.
  • How long the content has been published

For example, articles about the 2012 Olympics will not be gaining much traffic now because they are time-sensitive content. If you have content that is not dictated by time, then it is wise to invest in SEO for these articles and not PPC.

• Better conversions. Although PPC is a great way to gain contextual traffic, the organic results will still tend to produce the best results, in terms of quality of traffic, CTR on the link and a conversion rate.