Pay Per Click Advertising and SEO

One-two punch: combing pay-per-click with SEO. If you read most internet marketing sites, they will tell you that although pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be worthwhile in the short run, if you want to build up a long-term business, you need to depend on search engine optimization (SEO). While SEO can take longer to show tangible results than PPC, it's also less expensive, and can generate meaningful traffic for a much longer period of time.

A PPC campaign is just that, a campaign, with a limited time frame and a limited budget, one that can be severely hampered depending on the price of keywords and how many clicks the ads actually generate. The more clicks you get, though they may generate more business, the faster you will burn through your advertsing budget, especially if your keywords are charged at a high rate (some can go for over $12 a click). SEO, meanwhile, costs little to set up, can generate meaningful results not just in the short term, but over an entire lifetime, and can easily be shifted and re-targeted at little or no expense.

Pay-per-click has it's value, though, especially as preparation for a longer SEO campaign. Many experts have pointed out that PPC ads can be used to determine exactly which keywords get the best response on search engines, saving a good deal of guesswork when it comes time to prepare an organic SEO campaign. Since an SEO system can take up to three months to demonstrate results, it could easily take over a year for a company to discover the perfect keyword, or combination of keywords, to drive traffic to their site.

A PPC campaign, however, since it can use up to a hundred different keywords at once, can gather the same information in a matter of weeks at most. Once those keywords are found, they can be placed into an SEO campaign that will generate almost immediate results, results that may well continue for years with no additional advertising costs.

It's also important to remember, if you are running a sales site, that surveys have shown that people clicking on advertised sites are more likely to buy once they get there than those who find a site through organic SEO. In the short term, for clearance sales and other specials, PPC may be the best way to go. To build long term business, though, SEO, perhaps accompanied by brief PPC campaigns, which can be used to explore the market as well as generate rapid sales, is undoubtedly the best way to create and maintain search traffic.

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