Pay Per Click (PPC) vs Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Pay for click is when you pay a search engine such as Google to have your website appear at the top of the search engines in the brown sponsored link box as below.

seo vs ppc

The big advantage to this is that it is instant.
You can have your site begin appearing to people searching within the engines within half an hour of signing up.

How does this work?

Very simply. You pick your the terms you would like your site to appear.
For Example: you sell chocolate.
So you might pick "buy chocolate" and each time someone types in "buy chocolate" into Google you would appear in the "sponsored" box.
However, you pay for this. Each time someone, anyone, clicks on your link you pay. It does not matter if they buy from you or not, every time they click on a link you pay.

The price? It is done by auction, it is a bidding war. If someone offers Google more money than you, they will appear in the box and you won't. In reality what this means is for a main search term like "buy chocolate" you'll probably be paying £2.50 - £3.00 per click.

That means if you have 5% of your website visitors buying from you, you are now paying out between £50 - £60 to Google for each customer you get. For most companies this cannot be sustained, and you only continue appearing in the box for as long as you have money to pay when people click.

While you are spending money on it, your profits are being given to Google, and as soon as your budget runs out, you disappear and are replaced by a competitor.

Organic optimisation is not instant like pay for click.

It takes a minimum of 3 months to appear in high in the search engines. However you do not pay every time someone clicks on your link.

This means you can sustain a high volume of customers coming to you at a very low cost once you are ranked well. I'm repeating this again because it is key, it is far more economical and effective to optimise organically, but will take 3 months for you to rank. (more information above under 'How long does search engine optimisation take?')

The ideal is to do both. When targeted well, pay for click can yield good results and be very profitable.
Also whilst optimising to appear organically, it can bring the customers that you are looking for.
As you begin to rank well, you can then reduce your spending in pay for click whilst still getting customers, thus maximising your profits.

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