PPC Marketing vs Search Engine Optimization

Search has become an essential component for any online business, as more and more potential customers have realized search is a great way to research, find and purchase the products or services they want.

As a decision maker of an online business, you will certainly want to utilize search as a tool. You will often need to make the decision to spend your limited marketing budgets whether on search engine optimization or paid search marketing. In fact, you should base your decisions on 3 factors: Urgency, budgets, and resources.

Urgency

Paid search marketing is an instant way to provide exposure opportunities and traffic to the online business of your clients. If your business is new, or you are required to boost sales instantly, PPC is the right option.

Search engine optimization is aging process. The SEO efforts will not be obvious or will not even show in the first several weeks or months. SEO is however good because once it is implemented into the infrastructure, it is always there. If your business does not require immediate exposure in the web and you are not ready to spend huge amount of marketing budgets right away, SEO is the appropriate option.

Budgets

As a decision maker of your company, you often want to set a marketing budget, whether it is for PPC or SEO. Sometimes it makes sense to listen to the experts as they are the ones who know exact how much is required to achieve your marketing goals.

Some may argue that it is risky to throw whatever amount of budgets requested. However the truth is that the decision makers are often the non-savvy people who are very likely to set projects under-budget or over-budget. Many times I have seen SEO and/or PPC related projects failed to accomplish their end-goals due to under-budget.

Some businesses with limited marketing budgets see the tracking of results being essential. As an advertising channel, PPC marketing has always been known to have its end results or ROI trackable. Also the ROI being tracked can be very accurate comparing to the end-results produced by any equivalent SEO campaigns.

One of the benefits on SEO is that once the work is performed on the infrastructure of the project, it would not make an immediate negative effect if the marketing budget is pulled. A PPC campaign has to cease as soon as its advertising budget is stopped.

Resources

Sometimes your decision should be made depending on what human resources you have on hand. If you already have an SEO expert in your business, it makes sense to utilize his best skills. The benefits are that you can throw him the budgets and resources required right away and he will figure out how to make a successful SEO campaign. Of course, if your expert is rather very experienced in PPC, it is better to start a paid search marketing campaign.

On top of that, you will want to listen to your expert whether he will need further support on human resources or technologies. PPC or SEO these days are not anymore an operation in which an in-house-single-person can handle efficiently and effectively. Both SEO and PPC are becoming far more complicated and competitive ever than before. I have previously made some great points on why PPC are becoming more competitive in 2007.