What provides better quality traffic: pay-per-click ads or SEO? That is a question debated among online marketers. The answer usually depends on whether one does SEO or PPC. There are those saying SEO is cheaper (I’ll talk about this another time) than PPC and the traffic converts at a higher rate and of course say you should not use PPC at all.
The question to ask is, why would that be? It’s the same website. Traffic coming from one source or the other should not matter. What does matter is how SEO and PPC are implemented. You also have to compare apples to apples which is not always easy nor apparent.
You may target the same keywords in both instances, although if you have half a dozen keywords, it’s harder to do so in SEO effectively. Your page’s title and description tags will be different than that of a PPC ad. This will definitely affect the click rates and may even have an effect on conversion rates, even if the landing page is the same. So you cannot compare because traffic will be influenced differently by your ads – and make no mistake, your organic listing is your ad.
On the PPC side, one may show ads on the display and content network when they shouldn’t be. That will hinder conversions and thus the cost for each when PPC is not used optimally.
Therefore, you should not simply look at how many conversions and traffic was generated by each and make a calculation. Each method has its pros and cons and one really isn’t better than the other. I believe both should be part of a sound online marketing strategy. Indeed, they can both learn from each other to make each other better. This is where PPC shines and can be a driver of your overall online marketing tactics since you have a wide variety of data available, and following the data is what drives good decision making. When done properly, both PPC and SEO will improve your bottom line.
Increase your online sales by having Lucid Web Marketing manage your SEO and PPC campaigns.