Good Ezines

The unbridled growth of e-commerce means that you just cannot do without a website to take your business to the next level. But simply having a website is no guarantee to send you laughing all the way to the bank! In order to sell your goods and services via your website you must ensure that people actually visit your website. You may have heard that pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) are two great ways to draw traffic to your site, but then, which one should you use?

A Brief Description

Before you can decide whether to use PPC or SEO, you need to have a clear idea about what they are.

SEO:

You may know already that people who want to make a purchase on the internet take the help of search engines to provide them with multiple options which they can choose from. This is why search engine marketing methods are used to make sure that a webpage comes up towards the top of search results.

A combination of factors such as site content, coding and external linking can be altered to make sure that a site has high search engine ranking. This is called ’search engine optimization’ or SEO.

PPC:

When the goal is to make money and promote your business, you cannot forget about advertising as a tool of search engine marketing. Pay-per-click or PPC is a process by which you can place adverts on various sites of your choice. Whenever a visitor to a particular site clicks on your ad and gets redirected to your site, you get charged. Hence the name, ‘pay per click’.

Your Gains

In order to choose between PPC and SEO you need to know what you stand to gain from each of these search engine marketing tools.

The benefits of PPC are:

-You do not need to alter your website at all.

-You only have to pay when your ad is clicked and not under any other circumstances.

-The results of a PPC campaign can be quantified (number of clicks etc.) and changes can be made accordingly.

-You can choose the keywords which you want to include in your ad as well as the page to which people get redirected to, when they click on the ad.

-It can provide results almost instantly, for example, within an hour or so after you have started the campaign.

The Benefits of SEO are:

-The visitors from natural search engine results do not cost you a dime.

-If you can achieve a high search engine ranking via SEO, then it will take a very long time for some other site to displace you. So you can enjoy the benefits of being at the top, for long.

-Visitors trust sites which rank high on search engine results.

The Right Choice

The best strategy therefore may be to start with PPC to generate immediate traffic for your site. As time passes you can invest more in SEO and phase out PPC, in order to build a sustainable position. Thus, an effective marketing strategy must consist of both PPC and SEO.

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