PPC vs SEO

What’s the best then, paying for sponsored links or other PPC-solutions or getting proper SEO for the site?

There are advantages with both of course. The first advantage for PPC-solutions is the speed of which you get results. With Google you can get sponsored links up and running in a day while you’ll have to spend months before you get traffic with the SEO.

Another advantage with PPC is the exactness of the cost calculations. It is very easy to calculate  the exact profit when you know how much you pay for each visitor.

The primary advantage with SEO is that it’s actually cheaper (so far, this will probably change). At least in Googles PPC solution there is a totally free market. Sooner or later it will be a zero-sum game on every keyword. When your competitors can get ahead of you by just spending a cent more than you do they will try until they don’t make any profit on the visitor.

Another advantage with SEO is that you get the bigger share of the traffic. Most of us don’t use the sponsored links but we will click in the organic search result.

Another great advantage is the trust. People tend to trust companies in the organic results more than they trust the advertising ones.

We should not forget the long term benefits, SEO tends to be cheaper when the site is older and the SEO has been going on for a while. When the site is already listed in all the important link directories and lots of links have been exchanged it will have a serious advantage even if you stop buying the service from a SEO-company.

How to go about it?

One reasonable way is to use PPC during the startup to get quick results and move towards more organic visitors as time goes. If it is a “heavy demand keyword” you might want to use both even though the sponsored links will cost more and give less traffic.