PPC Pros
The most attractive offer of pay per click or PPC is the assurance that your site appears on the first page of Google (or other search engines that offer this service but google is by far the most popular one at the time of writing).
Your site appears as a boxed ad with a clickable link that directs visitors to your website or any preferred landing page.
However, this doesn’t mean that your website automatically ranks the highest as a search engine result.
PPC is dependent on the keywords you choose. During your trial and error stage, you may display your PPC ad across a number of keywords and keyword combinations for you to determine which ones work best for you.
Like most above-the-line ads, you can choose when and where your PPC ad is to be displayed. This saves a lot of money and could give you great ROI if you know your niche very well.
PPC ad results are easy to track using a wide array of metrics. All you have to do is correlate the numbers and determine the trends to guide your next move.
PPC Cons
Some of the keywords you choose could become very expensive to bid for, especially when you belong to a competitive industry. Advantage is heavily skewed towards online marketers who already know the behavior of their niche market by heart.
You won’t be able to reap the full benefits of PPC ads if you haven’t mapped out the landing pages that each ad would correspond to. You could end up wasting money attracting the wrong market.
The success of PPC ads depends heavily on tracking and monitoring. Shifts in your market dictate the keyword of the moment. If you’re not alert, you could be paying for a keyword that is no longer used by your market.
Not anyone can just set up and publish a PPC ad. You need the services of someone who has experience with Google AdWords for technical and performance monitoring.
SEO Pros
Once you’ve optimised your website, you will appear as a search engine result. You won’t have to pay for anything when visitors click your link. As part of the search engine results, your website gets non-stop exposure as long as you maintain a good-enough search engine ranking.
As long as you keep your website updated with relevant and optimized content, you can significantly increase traffic without external advertising costs. And because marketing expenditure is less, you won’t have to monitor your ranking as closely as you do with PPC advertising.
SEO Cons
Content optimisation is time-consuming because constant updating and writing is necessary. However, you may opt to outsource the writing, especially if you have more than one website to manage.
SEO does not guarantee your site first-page ranking. Improving your ranking requires constant content updates including link updates. It takes a while to build your internal and external links. You need this so that search engines have more places to find your website.
Marketing through SEO requires your site’s Content Management System (CMS) to be search-engine compliant. Otherwise, search engines won’t be able to crawl through your website.
There are many CMS system out there and WordPress as a software and blogging platform is a good resource to make sure that your website is search-engine compliant.