What is the benefit of SEO over Pay Per Click marketing?

Traffic is the lifeblood of any website. Certainly the success of your website is dependent on the quality and quantity of traffic that it receives. The most targetted source of traffic is from search engines (not from social media) and this can be from organic search or from pay per click advertising (e.g. Google Adwords).

However, there are a number of benefits that SEO work has over PPC, as all SEO consultants will tell you:

• Lower cost of ownership: Firstly, there are no clicks to pay for and your pages won’t disappear from Google or other search engines when your marketing campaign, advertising budget or offer runs out.
• More Google real-estate: Secondly, the organic results occupy the majority of Google’s screen real estate. The average search results page contains 2 advertisements or sponsored results and 10 natural search results – Google tries to give its clients what they need and that is generally quality content.
• Higher trust factor: Thirdly, the majority of clients click on organic search results (as opposed to paid results) as they know Google has validated your site.
• SEO has a better ROI than advertising: Lastly, and importantly, you can get up to 15x the amount of clicks from SEO that you would get if you were using paid search. Also, depending on the competition for a keyword and industry, to outbid by increasing PPC spend can get pretty costly. Marketplace analysis will prove this to be true. To quote the words of a top SEO Consultant: SEO is the gift that keeps on giving!

All this being said, SEO can run hand in hand wih PPC. Any good consulting SEO will tell you that PPC can be used to quickly test which keywords work for your business and which don’t. Therefore, it can also be used in the interim whilst SEO work takes place on your search engine optimisation for you.