18 Aug PPC vs SEO….which one?

So you want to market your website to increase traffic and sales, but should you use PPC or SEO? This was actually a trick question, as the answer is neither. You should actually be using SEM.

Now if you’re not familiar with the internet marketing world you may not know what these terms mean, so we’ll break it down for you.

PPC (pay per click) is a form of paid advertising that can yield quick results and sales. You create an ad and every time someone clicks on it you pay a certain amount to Google or another search engine. PPC is fast and effective if you know what you’re doing, but it’s also the easiest way to lose a lot of money quickly if you don’t.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the natural results that appear in Google or another search engine and being highly ranked can do wonders for your business as it brings in free traffic. However, this is a much slower process, especially for new websites, as it may take months to rank on the first page. SEO is usually more difficult for website owners to understand and most either ignore it (not recommended) or outsource it. The most important thing to remember in SEO is that bad SEO can hurt your business and possibly even get you banned from Google or other search engines which could be devastating.

What you should be using to market your website is SEM (search engine marketing). SEM is basically a combination of PPC and SEO (and possibly other strategies). The best strategy is to use PPC and SEO to complement each other so you can enjoy the benefits of both. PPC will get customers to your site quickly and SEO will build the long-term free traffic as well.