PPC VS. SEO For New Sites

The debate between using SEO and PPC for your website marketing is always going to happen and probably will never subside.  The main issue that some people have is that they either use PPC or SEO to drive most of their traffic.  There are  people on each side of the argument saying the PPC is more cost effective or SEO is.  We are going to jump in here with what we feel will work for sites that are new to the internet and are just trying to figure out how to begin their long journey in finding traffic.

The issue that new sites have is that they do not have the power to get indexed into search engines easily without a few quality inbound links with quality content.  Even if they do finally get indexed, it doesn’t mean that they automatically end up number one in google or the other search engines.  This takes time and frankly a lot of skill to achieve.  Most people think that once you achieve a good position, they have it and they can work on something else.  Wrong….you have to work harder to maintain the top position once you get it.

One way that webmasters do is to start marketing their site with PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.  This type of advertising is quick and easy to setup, especially in Google with their Adwords advertising platform.  New sites can start getting targeted traffic within a few hours of starting an account.  One of the good things about PPC is that you have the power to control where you show up in the search results in the paid advertising section.  Also, most PPC platforms have good reporting tools that can quantify your results.  It helps to have PPC running on a new site because you can see how your conversion rate is and where customers fall off on your site.  This will help with future development of your site.

SEO is a powerful tool that can keep you getting traffic over time without recurring a click cost for every visitor.  The money that is used to develop your SEO can be quantified down to cost per click, but some sites find it much less depending on how they do their SEO.  Some firms keep their SEO efforts in house and others outsource it to companies.  The main issue with SEO is that the results are not immediate and sometimes can take a long time to be apparent.  This does not mean that you should not do it, just that you should never stop doing it.  Webmaster and site owners should continually tweak and optimize their site in order to gain positions in the top search engines, thus getting more visitors.  SEO is a tough task and you have to do it correctly in order to succeed.  If you choose a SEO company to do it for you, please make sure they are reputable and have achieved results themselves.

While we like both methods for traffic gathering, some prefer one over the other.  If you have a new site and you are looking for traffic that is targeted and will convert, it would be wise that you implement both strategies simultaneously to gain success.  You can start a PPC campaign quickly along side with your SEO.  Once you start getting data from your paid search campaigns, you can tweak your SEO to gain the top of the best performing keywords for your site.  The main thing that you  have to remember is that you need to have a good analytics package in order to quality your results.  Without analytics, you will not know how well your doing and where you can improve.  Our advice is plain and simple for new sites, work both SEO and PPC into your mix and you should be happy with the results.

Related Posts:

• How to Setup your Google Adwords Account
• The Importance of the Keyword Meta Tag
• There are No Guarantees with SEO!
• Google’s Nexus One to Nexus None