Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a great method of marketing for many companies. PPC can get you listed at the top of the search engines immediately in the Sponsored Listings area. On Google, you’ll notice that the listings on the right hand side of the page say “Sponsored Listings.” If you click on one of those ads, the advertiser is charged a per-click fee. The fees range from around $0.05 cents to as high as $50 per click in some cases.

PPC can produce immediate results, while SEO takes quite a while to get you listed where you want to be, but there is far less traffic available through PPC than SEO. Less than 25% of the clicks for a particular search term are on PPC listings. In addition, searchers have come to trust the organic search results in Google as the most reputable and credible source for information on the product or service they’re searching for, which explains why consumers are over 5 times as likely to make a purchase after clicking on an organic search engine listing as opposed to a PPC ad.

PPC gives you the opportunity to rank well for hundreds of keywords, while your SEO efforts are generally limited to a small handful of keyrowrds. Often times, our clients will sign up with a company to do SEO for them on their core keywords, but will also have someone start a PPC campaign for them to rank well for keywords that are more obscure or do not have high enough traffic to be worthwhile to optimize for.

We have had many clients write to us and say something to the effect that they had been spending $5000 a month on PPC, but after doing SEO with a company we refered them to for 6 months at $2000/mo, they have 3 times as much traffic as they had ever received with PPC and their conversion rates have dramatically increased as well.

There’s nothing wrong with PPC, and nothing wrong with doing PPC and SEO at the same time. But we definitely recommend doing whatever you can to make SEO your home base.