SEO Vs PPC Advertising

Often potential clients will ask us this question: "Which is more effective, SEO or PPC?"

Depending on how you look at it, we will ask you to go for both, if you have not spent any effort in marketing your site online before.

In the short term, PPC is more effective because it brings fast result. We can setup a Google Adwords account for you within a day, and your ads can appear on the 1st page of search engines within a day as well. However, there will be monthly recurring cost for PPC advertising, whereby there is only a one time cost for SEO.

In the long term, SEO is definitely more cost effective because sites that are optimized properly will remain at the top of SERP for a long time. Since the cost for SEO is only one time, there is no recurring cost in constant bidding with your competitors.

Normally, a new site will need a PPC campaign for the 1st 6 months after its launch. Depending on the level of competition for your industry, you may allocate about $300 per month. For 6 months, this works out to be about $1800.

After the initial 6 months, SEO result will start to show. This is when you can see more qualified traffic generated from SEO. A typical SEO campaign cost about $3.5k.

Compare to PPC advertising, SEO result will surpass PPC advertising after 1 year which you can see.

Online marketing - SEO, PPC, Online advertising