Pay Per Click Advertising vs Search Engine Optimisation

When people think of promoting their website via search engines, the first thing they usually think of is search engine optimisation (SEO), rather than pay per click advertising (PPC). It is commonly and mistakenly believed that SEO is superior to PPC in that:

1. SEO is considered to be the best long term bet
2. SEO is considered to be more effective
3. SEO is considered to be cheaper

The only sense in which SEO is superior to PPC is in that users are far more likely to click on an "organic" search engine listing than they are to click on a sponsored listing.

The basic problem with SEO however, is actually getting your site into the (first few pages of) organic listings for a sufficiently wide range of relevant and popular search phrases. Competition is unbelievably fierce and the costs are thus formidable - often many thousands of pounds have to be spent to be effective, and meaningful results cannot be guaranteed. I discuss the reasons why I feel you may stand a much better chance with PPC than with SEO.

I do still provide search engine optimisation as a service but I usually recommend that the emphasis is on pay per click advertising. However, my PPC management service includes a measure of integrated search engine optimisation.

1. It can take months, (occasionally even years) for a site to be indexed by search engines and often much longer before it is well-positioned for your desired search terms. With PPC, your ads appear almost instantly.
   
   
   
2. Search engines frequently change their algorithms such that well-performing sites can suddenly find themselves poorly positioned, or even no longer indexed at all! PPC is far more predictable.
   
   
   
3. Competition for the top spots in the organic listings is fierce and often unfair - cheating methods such as cloaking and scraping are often used to hijack the top positions. With PPC, advertising campaigns are vetted so there is less scope for cheating and therefore fairer competition.
   
   
   
4. With SEO you can never realistically guarantee high positioning for popular search phrases for any length of time. With PPC you can adjust your bids constantly to match your competition and thus maintain high positioning for quite a large number of search phrases so long as the bidding does not become too expensive.
   
   
   
5. In the latter case where it becomes uneconomical to bid for high positions for popular search phrases, you at least know exactly where you stand with regard to the competition. With SEO you never really know exactly why another site is higher placed than you - there are simply too many factors to consider. You can therefore waste a lot of time and money trying to outdo another site for search engine positioning.
   
   
   
6. Pay Per Click Advertising systems enable you to advertise on a far wider range of search phrases than you could ever realistically optimise a website for.
   
   
   
7. You may never get seen at all in the search engine organic listings. At least with PPC your adverts will appear and will almost certainly be seen by at least some users.
   
   
   
8. When you optimise a site for search engine positioning, you only improve your visibility in the search engines themselves, nowhere else - unless of course you are using links from other sites as your SEO method, which is extremely time-consuming and therefore expensive. However, with PPC your ads appear all over the web on thousands of websites, as well as the search engines which provide the PPC systems. This is usually known as "Content Match".
   
   
   
9. When your listings show in search engine results they are often garbled showing bits of text. It is very difficult to control how search engines will display their results for your site. However with PPC you can write your ads exactly the way you want and bid on exactly what search terms you wish them to be associated with. You can also deploy picture ads and extended text ads in certain places.
   
   
   
10. In order to optimise a site for search engines it is often necessary to compromise the way you write the text for the pages in order to produce an optimal keyword density. You do not have this problem with PPC - you can leave your site the way you want.
    
    
    
11. The costs of optimising a website for the search engines can be formidable. For really effective optimisation for highly competitive search phrases you could be looking at a bill in the region of thousands - in some cases hundreds of thousands - of pounds. Low cost optimisation services can work well if the relevant search phrases are not highly competed for, but this is becoming increasingly rare. With PPC costs can be kept very low - you set the budget, and minimum budget levels are usually quite reasonable. Obviously over time competition will become equally fierce for search engine advertising placement so make use of the chance now!