PPC vs. SEO: Which Is Best For Your Businesss Site?

The prosperity of your site can be incredibly important to the success of your business. If you want to boost the traffic going to your business's website, there are essentially two main options available to you:

- Pay-per-click (PPC)

- Search engine optimisation (SEO)

So, how can you tell which one may prove best to you and your business?

PPC advertising (see - Essex PPC ) is provided by advertising programs such as Yahoo marketing service and Google Adwords, which allow you to pay for traffic. The ads that you pay for will be shown in the sponsored section of the search engine pages. The more competitive your selected keywords, the more expensive your advertisement fee will be. Nevertheless, the benefit of PPC is that every time the advert is visited, the search user will be sent directly to your site.

In contrast, SEO uses free techniques and methods to generate increased traffic for your site. It should be noted nonetheless, that SEO requires considerable more time. SEO is used to help get your website naturally ranking at the top of the search engine results pages. If done properly, over time SEO will help your website to reach the top of Google - letting you reap the rewards of increased, targeted traffic.

If you have little online experience, SEO could be a little tricky to get your head around. However, this is why a lot of web design companies offer SEO as part of their web design package. Alternatively, you can outsource the expertise of an experienced SEO company (see - on site SEO).

So - if you're wanting to increase your site's online traffic and grow your business, which should you opt for? SEO or PPC?

Here are the 3 key questions you need to be asking yourself when deciding which is most effective for you:

1. What is your budget?

Before choosing between PPC and SEO, consider your websites advertising budget. Consider setting a daily spending limit, as an example, it could be as low as £5 - £10 a day. Nonetheless, if you find that your business is not yet able to set a budget for your websites advertising, then SEO and its free methods are your only option.

2. How competitive are the search engine results pages in your niche?

How competitive are your keywords and phrases with the search engines like google? To find out, have a look at Google Keywords research tool - simply enter your keyword of choice and you can find out how many searches this keyword receives monthly as well as its competition rating (low-high).

3. What is the average cost-per-click (CPC) in your industry?

Do you know how much your competitors are paying to advertise your keyword? Discovering how much others are spending to advertise your keyword will help you better decide whether or not you have the budget to contend with that.

These 3 questions will assist you to better decide what will help your business to get the results that you crave. You should note however, that you don't always have to decide between the two; combining both PPC and SEO can be especially effective if you are looking to boost your site's traffic.

For more information on both PPC and SEO, see - information about SEOEssex .