Is PPC more effective than SEO at generating traffic?

EliteWriter Level 3

May 31, 2016, 4:40 am

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Is PPC more effective than SEO at generating traffic?

Personally I think that SEO is the best way to increase traffic to your site. It may be harder to implement and require more effort, but at the end of the day it is the most effective and it is a long term solution for promoting a site properly. I agree that PPC could be used to supplement SEO strategies. Yet, I know that there are many who prefer to opt for PPC only. Is PPC just an easy way out?

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MasterA

MasterA

PPC is fake traffic and it is nowhere near as good as SEO traffic. The only advantage with PPC traffic is that you can drive large amounts of traffic to your website in a short period of time. However, SEO traffic will have a much higher conversion rate than PPC traffic as PPC traffic are people who are only paid to view your website. PPC traffic only gives you short term traffic unless you keep putting money every month to get this traffic. Whereas, it is not compulsory to keep funding SEO in order gain traffic continuously; once you rank well on Google, you will rank well for a while and continuously get traffic even if you stop the investment.

As in which one is more effective, it depends what you mean by effective. If you want to drive large amounts of traffic to your website for the short term, then PPC is effective. For long term traffic, SEO traffic is more cost effective. PPC won’t help your SEO. SEO has no relationship with traffic and therefore paid traffic will have no effect. PPC is only a decent method if you want to increase your traffic for a short period of time.

8 years ago

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EliteWriter

EliteWriter

Very well explained thank you. I agree that the choice depends on one's needs and preferences. However for a long term goal of success SEO definitely is the way to go. PPC can be used to supplement it but no more than that as I agree that it is better to focus on the type of traffic that is getting on the site rather than merely on the number. After all it is quite useless to a certain extent to have someone arrive on a site, take a 2 second glimpse and leave.

8 years ago

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TommyCarey

TommyCarey

I try to run both an SEO campaign and a PPC campaign at the same time for my websites. This way I can generate instant sales with the PPC and long term sales with my SEO.

Why do I do this?
I set up my PPC campaigns first in order to generate sales right away. This happens because once I start pumping money into the PPC campaign I'm instantly (within 24 hours) I'm at the top of the search results. Now this is an artificial ranking and only lasts as long as you can keep pumping money into the campaign. This is the main reason start to do SEO on their websites.

Doing SEO for my websites while my PPC campaign is running is like a win win later on if I want to keep my PPC campaign going after my website is ranked and pulling in traffic. After about 3 months of running my PPC campaigns I can normally pull back on a lot of my PPC keywords since I'll be ranked on the top of the first page, or close to it. Why pay per click on keywords you're already ranked for? Sure you'll get a few more clicks with your site being above the natural rankings, but it doesn't always benefit you.

Since SEO takes some time, you'll want to start it as soon as your website is launched. No one wants to wait 3-6 months to start making sales and that's where PPC campaigns come in handy.

Conclusion:
- Run a PPC campaign as soon as your website is set up and fully configured.
- Monitor and tweak your PPC campaign so that it converts as best it can.
- Begin your SEO and Marketing in order to build your brand and rankings over 3-6 months.
- Start filtering out PPC keywords as you begin to rank for them naturally.

Thanks,

Razzy

8 years ago

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EliteWriter

EliteWriter

That was a very interesting suggestion. Thanks for sharing. It is a good way to put PPC campaigns to good use, but I can see that you still make use of SEO afterwards. So it is a great mix and match idea.

8 years ago

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robertman11

robertman11

Just generating traffic? With no restrictions on money spent for PPC? PPC. I say this because with SEO you have to rank for terms people are searching for and for any term, there is a limited amount of people searching for anything.

With ads and PPC, you can advertise to everyone. People who are interested in your website, people who aren't, even people who hate your website/product/idea. With enough money, you could literally put your website in front of almost every person online and generate substantial traffic to your site.

Of course, this isn't targeted and will like have very little conversions which is where I'd say SEO would excel. Conversion rate was not specified in the original thread though.

8 years ago

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Corzhens

Corzhens

I agree that PPC has the advantage of earning a bigger profit because SEO is not an exact science. But if you hit the SEO right on target then your website will be getting free traffic from the search engines. I have read some webmasters who say that they get more than 50% of traffic from search engines and their SEO work is just minimal. That may be the reason why webmasters are focused on SEO because of the immeasurable traffic that you site can get when you get to the upper position on the page 1 of the search list.

6 years ago

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