Pay Per Click VS Organic SEO...and the winner is?

Pay Per Click has changed the way we advertise our businesses. PPC has made it possible for small and large business alike to show up on the first page of Google, as long as they are willing to pay for it. Even if you don't have a website, you can create a landing page and push a product or service. This would certainly save you the time and money of building and optimizing a site. Still, how much better is PPC compared to organic SEO? Well, let's take a look...

PPC will allow your add to hit the engines very quickly, where organic SEO could take months to produce the same results. Organic rankings, however, cost you nothing per click, whereas PPC could cost you any where from a few pennies to a few dollars. Recently I wrote an article that discussed how organic SEO was choose five to one over PPC. Organic listings are more popular because they are more relevant. PPC ads are paid advertisements and may or may not be what you are looking for.

What about PPC fraud? Google just shelled out 90 million dollars due to fraudulent clicks. What does that mean to you? Well it could mean that your competitor could try to deplete your advertising money by clicking on your ads in the hopes of running your daily budget dry so they can have less competition. Or, it could be that your ad is on a website that is related to what you sell. The site owner that hosts your ads gets paid when someone clicks on it. Some site owners will go to great extremes to get as many fraudulent clicks as possible. It's a get rich scheme that has worked in the past, although Google has really cracked down on it.

So, what happens to PPC? Will search engines improve their methods to stop click fraud? The latest theory is that search engines will allow you to pay only if a sale is made or a form is completed. Good idea? Maybe, maybe not. The agreed upon cost per lead, which would take the place of the bid, will be high. What will they do with sites that sell over a phone number? Leads can still come from there as well.

Anyone who knows me and my work knows how I feel about organic SEO. I have helped many companies increase their search engine traffic and lowered their dependency on PPC. In my mind organic should come first and be aided by PPC, but that's just one man's opinion.

This round goes to organic SEO! Click as many organic listings as you want. I dare you!

Joe is an SEO expert. His SEO/SEM firm has helped many companies increase there organic placement. He also writers articles and creates a weekly podcast on SEO. Win SEO for your site just for post on the Mr SEO message board.