So you’ve just got your spanking new website up but no visitors? Well let’s take a look at the two prime internet marketing avenues; Pay-per-Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). PPC and SEO are different modes of advertising on the Internet that help you drive relevant traffic to your website. Both of them offer their advantages and disadvantages which we will talk about in a second, but let’s first get ourselves acquainted to these terms.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) involves the advertiser (you) bidding on a specific service or product related keywords which will be shown on the right column of the Google search results also called the Sponsored links.

Your personalized advertisements will be ranked based on the popularity of the ad combined with the amount you bid on that particular search term. Advertisers pay Google each time a potential prospect finds and clicks one of there ad displays.

SEO, on the other hand refers to search engine optimization, SEO involves numerous on-site and off-site optimization techniques. One of the most common practices includes strategically placing keywords throughout websites content which search engines cache. Inbound Link Building is another popular way of boosting your overall website ranking. Links on the internet from industry related website pointing back to your website are viewed as voting points to search engines such as Google, the more links you receive the higher your page rank score.

Neither SEO nor PPC is a better option; choosing an internet marketing strategy is something you will have to weigh up based both on there pros and cons.

Advantages

The greatest advantage that PPC has is its ability to give you instant results. Since your advertisement is placed right at the top, the exposure you receive is enormous. Apart from this, you don’t even have to alter the contents of your page. They can be placed on top and that too in the way you want them to. Also the risk involved is minimal. You only pay when someone clicks on your advertisements. Moreover, PPC allows you to monitor your performance from time to time. The flexibility of PPC Advertising has to be admired, you can change your keywords whenever you want and bid however much you want on those terms, as per your requirement.

The biggest advantage of SEO is that it helps you remarkably improve your rankings on the search engines. Since it’s a long term investment project, it gives an excellent return on investments. It is cost effective and helps drive in more traffic because of its better usability and accessibility. It enhances the credibility of your website and thus helps to build client loyalty as well. If the SEO is done effectively, it will definitely help you boost your sales and rankings. And moreover, it will help you maintain them.

Disadvantages

PPC advertising can easily do a hole in your pocket. The bidding of some popular keywords can sometimes turn out to be very expensive. The uncertainty that someone else might bid higher than you and that he might get placed on top always remains there. The profits also stop pouring in once you stop paying.

SEO also has its own disadvantages. You might to need to wait for a long time to reap results. There is no guarantee that once you have used SEO for your website, the search engine will rank it high. Also if you are thinking that SEO does go easy on your pockets always, then think again. Getting and SEO done for some popular term can end up costing you a fortune. The modifications done in the original text, because of the SEO, might just lead to losing the original impact which your website had earlier carried.

Thus, the bottom line remains that it can’t be decided which one of the two is better. Infact, the irony remains that both are needed to get your business going or shall we put it as ‘growing’.