Marketing Your Small Business... PPC or Organic Traffic

When you are looking to advertise your website, you will encounter many methods for getting traffic to your site. The 2 main methods which you will encounter will be PPC (Pay Per Click advertising), and Organic Traffic (traffic from the Search Engines such as Google).

Both of these methods attempt to get large amounts of targeted traffic to your website, which will hopefully generate some sales.

Businesses should ideally try to use both methods for generating traffic to there site, however, the question still remains on which one they should focus the majority of their attention on.

Organic traffic is where you try to get your website listed in the Search Engines so that when someone types in keywords that are related to your website, your site will show up first, or at least very highly on the page.

PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. This is where you purchase traffic from online advertising companies. These companies will display ads on other people's sites, and on the advertisers search engine. These are the results that you see on the top of the page that are highlighted in blue, and the results that you see on the side of the page when you do a Google Search.

Experts in the field of internet marketing have been debating which one is more valuable for a long time, and the debate is still going on.

Though both are usually considered to be essential for creating a good online business, it is still undecided on which one you should focus most of your efforts on.

Here is a basic rundown of the pros and cons of using each method.

Organic Traffic Benefits:

1) People are Looking for Your Product - When people do a Google (or any other SE) Search, they are often looking for a particular product, or service. With SEO (Search Engine Optimization) you are allowing people to find your site, by typing in exactly what their looking for. Where as with PPC people just kind of stumble upon your site, and may be less interested in your site.

2) Appears Less Biased - Most people don't know how online advertisements work, they just assume that the advertisements are part of the page's content. But, there are some people that do know how online ads work, and thus may not trust the ads as much as organic results, becuase they know that the advertisements have been paid for. The equivalent of this in the real world is when you see a TV advertisement, and a friend tells you about another product that is similar, you will be more likely to buy the product that your friend tells you about, because it appears unbiased.

3) More permanent - With PPC ads, you get however many clicks you purchase. Once all of the clicks have been delivered, you won't get any more page views unless you buy more traffic. With SEO however, you will continue to get traffic for a much longer time. It might not continue forever if you don't do anything, however it can last forever if you do occasionally redo your SEO campaigns.

Benefits of PPC Advertising:

1) Immediate Results - With SEO, you will not see results for at least a few months, however, with PPC you will get results very quickly probably the same day.

2) Testing CPM - Its much easier to test how many sales you get per page view or per thousand (CPM), this tells you how valuable your site is, and how you can optimize it better. PPC gives you better statistics for what you could improve on your site, and how your site is doing.

3) Easier to Calculate - With SEO you can't really buy a set amount of traffic. This makes it hard to figure out what your ROI (Return on Investment) will be. With PPC advertising it is easy to find out what your ROI is, and you can figure out how many page views it takes to get a sale. With PPC you can base your campaigns on how much money you make per page view on average. For example, lets say you get one sale on a product that makes you ten dollars per sale, for every 100 page views that you get. On average that is 10 cents per page view. This means that as long as you pay less than 10 cents per click, you will make money. This is very hard to figure out with SEO, but is easy to do with PPC.

PPC is much better for people looking to test there site, and get a ROI that is fairly consistant. SEO is better for people looking to create a more long term result, but are willing to risk a little bit more, and don't care so much about there ROI, but just want to make a profit, in the long run, whatever it may be.