SEO vs PPC

I guess it's down to the competitiveness of the key words.

For local business directory (see what I did there ) I'm mid page 1.

But for Free Advertising, the organic competition is too tight, so PPC in this case works well for me.

But personally if I can, I'd always aim at organic over PPC. I suppose it depends if you are looking at a few keywords or phrases, or a multitude. Being a directory, we need to optimise for tens of thousands of keywords, but PPC is always good to plug any gaps, or to give a boost where needed.

I think SEO investment will stand the test of time and give a better ROI than PPC, as even though most SEO shops will insist that you need to spend to maintain your results, after the initial optimisation. From my experience, most of the time that's doesn't appear to be true.

I've got literally thousands of keywords on the first page of google, and the majority are pretty stable and costing me nothing. If that was PPC, I'd be queuing up at the soup kitchen!

Mmmm - that's a tough one!

I am a massive PPC champion because I like the quickness of it but you are constantly spending. SEO is time consuming and costly in the beginning but eventually it becomes a less costly form of marketing to attract customers. I think if you were to look at a costs and return over a 3 year period then perhaps SEO would be the most cost affective for the chosen keywords.

I think Steve has got it spot on when he says it depends on the keyword volume. If you are a service site with a relatively small group of effective keywords (mine would be a good example of this) then SEO is worth the effort. However, sites like yours and Steve's where you have so many variants of mid tail keywords, you could be at the SEO for years and years!

I have worked on site that have no or very little off-page SEO (on-page SEO is good though) and they are situated on the first page of Google and have been for a good number of years. A bit more effort of off-page and i am sure they would have a higher position though

I would say PPC is the daddy. Use the info and data from your PPC campaigns to work out the keywords that are right for your site and then look at building links for these keywords to get the organic. Once you are on there and in your desired position, you can if you want, turn off the PPC for these keywords. However, I wouldn't advice this as having a PPC listing and organic listing give you more of a page share so more chance of converting.

MB Has taken my Greeklish and made my point better then I had.

I have about 50 words that I need to optimise for.
At the moment I am only PPC-ing about 10 or so and I am seeing extremely cost effective and high conversation rates.

For me to employ an SEO bod for these 10 keywords we are talking serious numbers.

Alternatively I can keep paying my PPC bill optimise the keywords organicly over a few years and if we do get to the top loosen up the spending on the PPC side.

Hi,

Have you had much luck? I've been in the industry for many years and always happy to advise. You got a URL?

Thanks,

Matt.

SEO - The search engine industry as a collective name for activities that are directly or indirectly aimed at improving a Web page's search engine ranking.

PPC - Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model, wherein a website pays a set amount, whenever someone clicks on their ad. This is a part of paid inclusion.

I recall a stat from SEOMoz presentation on 2010 year in review which stuck with me which was something to the effect that 80% of search engine traffic is organic/natural (non-paid) traffic, yet industry spend on PPC vs SEO in US is something like 5 to 1 which would seem to indicated that SEO represents tremendous value. This is in full view of the fact that not all organic results are SEO driven (some people get to #1 ranking without knowing or even trying, even for competitive keywords!)

If SEO is your route, then you need to understand enough about SEO to find a firm that matches your risk tolerance as SEO tactics have different levels of effectiveness and different levels of risk associated with them. Penalties from the Search Engines can include exclusion from the index, which for some businesses and for particular search engines (cough ... Google) can mean game over.

Based on your cost/click and conversations rates, it seems like PPC is pretty cost effective for you and in some sense, could be used as a benchmark in terms of ROI when comparing to SEO proposals.

Right, I hate it when people babble on about content is king, but it is true and you could find the best way to start ranking for lots of keywords is by adding lots of content.
Unfortunatly it doesnt end there as all this wonderful new content could be optimised to make it rank better. Its the same with PPC, you can optimise your pages, not just your adverts and they can work off each other.
Our most succesful clients use a combination of new content, onsite and off site SEO and PPC.
I wouldnt recomend one over the other simply because I dont know enough about your site and where you are in promoting it, but I do think too many people grab at PPC as some miracle cure, if your landing page isnt optimised then the advert is going to cost you twice as much and when someone lands on your page their not going to buy, so I would just say make sure your site is up to scratch before embarking on PPC.

Hey Nikora, you know what they say...

content is king...

Its like the word "nice", its short pointless and hardly means anything!

What you actually mean is, good quality content which engages the user and proves to be an interesting enough read that people feel compelled to share it with others and is not ripped from some other site that people have read a million times so that you can gain a few keywords to your site... is king!