Pay-Per-Click vs Search Engine Optimization
When people think about advertising on Google they generally have two choices: advertising via Google's pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system AdWords or getting into the organic results yourself by optimising your website.
When should you choose SEO and when AdWords?
The big benefit of AdWords is that you can have results quickly. Half an hour and your off in the Google search results and getting traffic. These instant, great results come at a cost, though. Pay-per-click. Yes you pay for every click, and sometime this click can be very expensive.
In saturated markets, where the competition for AdWords ads is strong the prices get bid up to barely justifiable levels. In many markets the sellers margin gets pretty much eaten up by the ever-rising costs of pay-per-click advertising and unless you have some special advantages in the off-line world you can utilize to make a larger margin than you competition, AdWords might eat up all the extra funds you get from your new clients.
Does this mean that SEO is always the way to go? Not necessarily. When comparing SEO and PPC there is a tipping point, at which SEO starts having a greater and greater advantage until soars away in terms of return on investment.
What's this tipping point? Well, for every market it's different, but generally the more money you spend on online advertising the more you will want to go for SEO instead of pay-per-click.
When spending a very small amount on online advertising (lets say $300) you will usually get a better results with pay-per-click advertising. Not always though! In markets with very little competition a little SEO can often do wonders. However, the more you plan to spend on Internet marketing, the better you will usually be with SEO.
And then there is a special moment, where search engine optimisation just takes off. Once you hit the number 1 spots in the rankings for your most valuable keywords, you usually hit the bank and you will never see the sense of going back to pay-per-click.
Of course, you can combine both methods, and this is actually a quite popular approach. Starting off with pay-per-click advertising and SEO can get you some early customers. Additionally, you get the benefit of actually getting to know the real amounts of traffic specific keywords get and choosing the most beneficial ones for your search engine optimization efforts.