Organic SEO vs. Pay Per Click

When you pay a search engine for each visitor they send to your site, this is called pay per click (PPC). Pay per click listings are usually marked as advertisements or “Sponsored Links” and appear above or beside the search engine’s organic listings.

Organic search engine optimization is done by optimizing the web pages of your site itself and by creating link popularity which drives your website to the top for the chosen search terms.

In this article, we will review the advantages and drawbacks of each method of search engine placement.

Organic Search Engine Optimization

A myth exists that organic search engine optimization is cheap. It isn’t. If you are targeting a search term along the lines of “web hosting”, you’ll be looking at a minimum of four figures per year.

Even so, organic pay per click is most often more cost effective than pay per click. Organic search engine placement is often done by creating link popularity, and it is often a link popularity that endures long afterwards.

One of the drawbacks of organic search engine placement is the time required to get your website to the top. As search engines do not update their indexes (database) daily or even weekly, it can be 4 to 6 months or more to see the full effects of a professional optimization job.

Pay per click (PPC)

Primary benefit of pay per click is the immediate results and complete control it offers the advertiser. You can commit $10, or $10,000. You may target one set of keywords today, and if they don’t work out you may target an entirely different set of keywords tomorrow.

As a short term strategy, pay per click is ideal. The drawback of PPC is the cost. A top position for some search terms can cost thousands each day. Over the long term, organic search engine optimization is much more cost effective.

Inference:

There is a rule of thumb in advertising. It says that if a campaign achieves full ROI, it is worth doing. That is to say, if the cost of advertising is earned back by the ad, it’s worth doing. By this standard, you may often justify the cost of PPC. But the fact remains that it leaves you with little or no margin.

The purpose of organic search engine optimization is to increase those margins.