PPC vs SEO: Which Is Better?
When you’re ready to start doing some affiliate marketing, the two most popular options to bring traffic to your sites is by using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) methods or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods. So which should you concentrate on to bring you in more profits?
Well this seemingly simple question is actual quite complex and can often be a philosophical decision in addition to a business one. Obviously, you have to consider your return on investment (ROI) depending on which you choose, but also which business model you prefer to follow.
Now lets give an example of what I mean. Say I told you that I can pay you $10,000 a month but it will cost you $4,000 out of your pocket to get it. That’s still a profit of $6,000 so I’m sure you would be interested. But wait, I have a second option. I can give you $5,000 a month and you wouldn’t have to spend anything to get it. So, which would you choose?
Obviously the astute business person would choose the first option because they are making $1,000 more than the second option. However, this requires more investment on your part, i.e. having that $4,000 ready every month to spend. On the second option, you don’t have to worry about balancing any budgets or checking your ROI, you just get money right into your account.
This is essentially the decision you make when you want to choose PPC vs SEO. With PPC methods you are spending money to have your ad show up on the top placements of the Search engines using Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing. With SEO, you are optimizing your website pages to appear at the top of the organic search engine results to leverage free traffic.
Here is a comparison chart I’ve put together:
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Pros
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Cons
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So ultimately, which should you concentrate on using? Both! Ideally, you should try to cover as many ways as possible to get traffic to your site. You could start with some PPC campaigns while working on the SEO of your pages.
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Filed under: Increase Traffic, SEO on January 20th, 2008
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