It’s one thing weighing up the pros and cons of both search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click advertising (PPC) and it is a completely different thing understanding just when to use SEO and PPC to your advantage as a traffic generation tool. After all, that is what it is all for in the end: traffic – it is what everything is dictated by online. For this reason, to save yourself time and money, here is some information on SEO and PPC and when to use them to their most effectiveness.

When to use PPC

Pay per click advertising is the most used form of advertising worldwide and evolves around the idea that you only bid for the clicks of traffic you generate from adverts. This means, on the whole, PPC advertising is a very cost efficient form of traffic generation that will guarantee yourself results for every buck you invest into it.

Here are a few examples when you should use PPC:

• When you need instantaneous results – PPC is great at delivering you traffic within minutes of a campaign going live, unlike SEO. With this in mind, if you need traffic to enter a landing page in a very short time frame, your best bet is, by far, to go for PPC.
• When you need highly targeted traffic – SEO will produce traffic that is contextual to the content you have created. However, it is never going to be as targeted as PPC is, which offers location targeting and many more features. Therefore, if you need to hit a very specific niche, again, your best bet is to use PPC.
• When your website’s SEO is poor – If you find your website or landing page is lacking SEO finesse, then you may argue the effort, time and money spent on improving the SEO of the website will not be worth the traffic it generates. This is particularly the case with landing pages such as infomercials which lack lots of content (since the website is usually one page).

When to use SEO

SEO is the term used to classify the ‘tools’ that can help a website improve it’s organic search ranking to get more clicks on search engine results. On the whole, it takes a lot of time to get SEO running. However, when it is working, the results are long term and much cheaper than PPC.

Here are a few examples when you should use SEO:

• When you need consistent and long term results – SEO is great at generating traffic for months and years to come. This is because once you have enabled your website to be ranked on the first page of results, there is little reason for it to not appear there afterwards. For this reason, you can expect consistent and long term results with SEO.
• When you want to improve your website – At the end of the day, PPC will get you great traffic. However, it will not do your website any favours, unlike SEO. If you want to improve the organic status of your website, which is key to the success of it, SEO is the way to go.
• When you cannot afford PPC – PPC is always going to cost you money, unlike SEO which is a free way to gain traffic (but does require time instead).