Why SEO Is a Better Choice for Your Rankings than PPC?

Most companies nowadays have some kind of presence on the web, even if it’s just a home page. It’s pretty telling that the biggest companies have large, elaborate sites that are easy to find after a quick search using any search engine. A great deal of business today is done on the internet, and it pays for companies to have a website, even if it’s not an e-commerce site and is purely for informational purposes.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful, functional or informational your website is, however, if your potential customers are unable to find it when they’re searching. Generic keywords – for example “shopping” – are more commonly typed into search engines than specific words such as the names of sites where customers could do their shopping. If your site is only displayed on the third or fourth page of results, your potential customers are obviously going to shop elsewhere; i.e., a site they will be able to find in a couple of seconds on the first page, perhaps even in the top couple of results.

There are a couple of methods you can use to get your website to be displayed in the first couple of results; the most popular of these methods are PPC and SEO.

PPC, or Pay per Click, is where a company will bid for keywords so they will be displayed as a featured page at the top of the search engine rankings by default. Every time a user clicks on your link, you have to pay the search engine the agreed fee, with the idea being that you would gain more than the price of the click in business from the customer that clicks on the link. As you can imagine, there’s a large margin of error involved in PPC, and if you’re not experienced or skilled with it you can end up costing your company a fortune without ever getting business from it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Again, it’s worth getting an experienced agency in to work on your SEO, but unlike PPC, you just pay the agency, without paying for the clicks on top of that. SEO involves slight tweaks of your site and the creation of back links to drive traffic to your site via the natural search results. By aiming your site towards certain keywords that your clientele are likely to search for (again, an SEO agency will be able to research what these keywords are), you can ensure that you will remain high in the search engine rankings for a fraction of the cost of PPC.