Search engine optimization or Pay-per-click?

As soon as one decides to venture into the murky world of internet marketing the first question that needs to be addressed is whether to focus solely on organic search engine optimization techniques or pay-per-click promotions (Google Adwords). Even though one would always prefer to harness the benefits of both the methods choosing one among the two can be a necessity because of initial budget constraints.

A lot of research has been performed to prove one better over the other. Organic search engines optimization has time and again been proved to offer several benefits over a pay-per-click campaign. Recent studies shows that people tend to click paid search links less than the unpaid ones. Users tend to ignore the sponsored links and directly hover over the organic list generated by the search engines. The main reason attributed to this is trust. People tend to trust organic result much more than the paid ones. Some searchers even find the paid links annoying as they take the top place in any search result. People feel that unpaid results are more relevant as they are placed higher because of their relevance to the context and not because they have paid to be there. Searchers find organic search results as non-biased and hence more valuable. Today searchers are aware of the distinction between the paid and unpaid results of search engines and they tend to consider the unpaid results more than the paid ones.

But if search engine optimization is so good why would anyone go for pay-per-click advertising. There are of course certain benefits associated with pay-per-click advertisement as well. Pay-per-click advertisements tend to produce results MUCH more quickly than standard search engine optimization but then organic search engine optimization is considered to produce result that last longer than the pay-per-click advertisements.

I view my sites in this way. When it’ a new site you are going to have zero traffic from organc search for maybe up to 6 months! Start a PPC campaign and target your main keywords to generate some instant traffic. Of course monitor your budgets tightly on a monthly basis. This approach will get the traffic flowing. Now at the same time work hard on your organic SEO campaign, build your links and constantly add fresh content to build your site. After a time you will start to see FREE traffic from this work. Do a little bit everyday. Of course it’s not free traffic LOL as you work damned hard for organic SEO traffic but you know what I mean. You DO NEED a monthly SEO and internet marketing budget so be serious about it!

I have written two courses on this subject but decided for 2013 to rewrite them both so watch this space for the new versions later this year.

Mark