Search engine optimization and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are both forms of search engine marketing, and each has their advantages and disadvantages.

PPC PROS & CONS

1. PPC doesn't get as many clicks. Organic or natural search results get more clicks than pay per click ads, on average. Generally you're looking at 30-40% of the clicks going to PPC ads, and 60-70% going to organic search engine results. However, that ratio may be different for the specific keywords you want to rank for.

2. PPC is not free. PPC not only costs money but takes time. Some people think that it's easy to set up a PPC campaign and then you just let it go. On the contrary, even with a relatively small company that has modest PPC needs it's easy to spend 10-20 hours per week managing a PPC campaign for maxium effectiveness.

3. You pay to play. With PPC if you're not paying, you're not getting anything. If you get 100 clicks, you'll pay for 100 clicks. If you get 200 clicks, you'll pay twice as much. With SEO you pay the same amount whether you get 100 clicks or 1,000. However, this drawback to PPC is also one of its advantages. While you only get results when you pay for them, you only pay for the results you get.

I would recommend to almost all clients that they do both SEO and PPC. If they both provide positive results, why not? It doesn't have to be a choice between one or the other. You can run SEO and PPC campaigns simultaneously, and in fact there are some benefits and synergies to running both types of campaigns at the same time in terms of identifying valuable keywords and spotting trends.

SEO PROS & CONS

1. SEO is an ongoing process. Your site will never be 100% "optimized," it will only get more and more optimized as you put more work into it. But if you have someone spending 20 hours per week doing SEO for your website today, chances are you'll still need 20 hours of SEO per week a year from now. The good news is that a year from now your rankings will be better and you will hopefully be reaping the rewards of having invested in SEO.

2. SEO is not free. If you do it yourself, you're going to invest your time. You'll probably want to invest some money in various SEO tools as well. If you hire somebody to do SEO for you, then you're going to be paying them. There is no free SEO service.

3. SEO is both easy and difficult. While most business owners could learn to do SEO themselves, most wouldn't decide to spend their time that way any more than they would change their own oil in their car. It's just not worth their time, and it can get difficult in certain situations. However, we never discourage our clients from learning as much SEO as they want to as it can only improve their results as well as their working relationship with us.

To summarize, we recommend both SEO and PPC. However, if you had to choose just one, we believe SEO provides certain long-term advantages.

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