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Organic SEO vs PPC Advertising

There are many differences between organic SEO and PPC advertising. Often, we need to decide where to put our investment that may potentially fetch the highest ROI.

As there are recent news that Yahoo! may display Google ads on its search engine network, we will concentrate our discussion solely on Google advertising for now.

While both of these are 2 very different forms of search engine marketing, each has its own merits and should not be mixed up. To make things simple, we have tabulated the differences below:

Organic SEO	PPC Advertising
High upfront investment [one time]	Small, recurring and monthly investment required
Much longer time for visible result [about 3 to 6 month]	Result is immediate, less than few hours
Report is not automatically generated, provided by SEO consultant	Report is generated by Google Adwords
Higher clickthrough rate as listings appear on left hand side	Lower clickthrough as the ads are normally squeezed together in a left hand column
Potential customers are more targeted, genuine and ready	Potential customers are less likely to buy through your website
Indirect traffic from external websites through link building itself	Traffic is generated solely on search engine network itself only, E.g Gmail.com, blogger.com
Long term benefit, higher ROI in the long run	Short term fast result, Immediate ROI in the short term
Website content optimization needed	Website content can remain unchanged
No click fraud as the listing is FREE	Possible click fraud by competitors!
Listing position is stable and free in the long run	Ad position is subject to future price hike in bidding
Perceived by visitors as sites that are pre-screened by search engines [high ranking websites]	Perceived by visitors as advertisements. Website quality is unkown

From the above, you may clearly see that PPC advertising bring short term immediate result. This is suitable for newly built websites that are not yet indexed by the major search engines such as Google. But in the long run, we definitely advise our customers to opt for organic SEO.

A typical SEO campaign will cost about $3.5k. On the other hand, this investment may be spent on PPC advertising for a period of 12 months, $300 per month. After 1 year, the cost for SEO is $0 and there is still a recurring cost of $300 for PPC campaign.

Although there are obvious benefits that comes with SEO, organic search listings are not displayed as ads on Google's network of websites such as Gmail. To tap on Google's wide coverage of users, we still need to consider PPC advertising as one of the alternatives. After all, majority of Google's revenue is actually generated from its PPC advertising service.

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