It is important for a company to employ effective marketing strategies if it is to establish consumer support and awareness for its products and services. As the internet becomes a more accessible medium for many people, marketing strategies are being streamlined to accommodate the medium’s ability to promote services to a wider clientèle.

While there are an array of strategies that can be used to achieve online visibility, search engine optimization and pay-per-click campaigns remain to be two of the most popular options. Each has its own merits and for most marketers, both offer cost-efficient ways of promotion. However, when it comes to SEO versus PPC, SEO campaigns seem to lead the pack.

The great debate

Each campaign has its merits but if you’re looking for immediate results, you’ll probably find yourself investing more on PPC. Pay-per-click advertising enables your site to come up first in search results pages for your keywords because you’re paying the search engine for it. Depending on your marketing objectives, you will need to shell out a few hundred to thousands of dollars for this campaign, though. PPC is great if you want to assess your conversion rates so you can tweak your pages to suit your visitors. It’s a good short-term strategy, but it wouldn’t work for a long term objective such as steady traffic.

Search engine optimization, on the other hand, is a lengthier process of tweaking your site and generating links so you get the decent SERP that you’re aiming for. As long as you stay within the standards set by search engines, your site’s pages will remain indexed indefinitely. If you’re looking for more sustainable results, SEO will serve you well.

Let’s say that you spend $10,000 dollars on a PPC campaign. Expect that amount to run out in just a few hours or, at most, in a day or two (depending on the competitiveness of your keywords). Once you stop spending on the campaign, your paid ads will cease to appear, and you will see a decline in your site visitors.

Take the same $10,000 and spend it on an SEO strategy, and you can realistically achieve top rankings that endure. SEO is longer-term and more cost-effective because unlike in PPC, you never have to pay the search engine each time you appear in the results pages. So, if you intend to stay visible for a long time, you want to channel a substantial amount of your marketing budget into SEO. Blackwood Productions offers affordable, professional, white-hat SEO packages for all types of businesses.