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Is SEO The Best? Pay Per Click Management Companies Would Like To Differ

There are a lot of people online talking about how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the best way to get traffic to your website, bar none. Well, there are a lot of PPC (Pay Per Click) companies that disagree. The numbers that the SEO companies use to point out the benefits of SEO look powerful on paper: 80% of all search marketing money is spent on PPC, but only 20% of all search traffic is generated by PPC.

Makes it sound like PPC is ridiculously inefficient compared to SEO, but the numbers paint an incomplete picture. The fact is that of the 80% of the search traffic that isn’t generated by PPC, there’s no way to know how much of it was actually influenced by SEO companies. It’s certainly not 100%. Furthermore, a HUGE portion of that traffic isn’t commercial traffic. It’s people going to Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook. PPC traffic, on the other hand, is 100% commercial traffic — it’s literally ad-driven.

The big difference between PPC and SEO isn’t cost-efficiency, no matter what the SEO companies want to tell you. The difference is in when you pay for the traffic. SEO, you pay up front for months, and then the traffic comes. PPC, you pay after the visitor comes to your site. In other words, you have a chance to make money off of the visit before you ever pay for it. It’s a huge benefit to cashflow.

The best Pay Per Click management companies can turn a few hundred bucks of your advertising budget into a few hundred visits to your website — and if your web designer and copywriter have done their jobs, 3-5% of those visits will turn into purchases. All you have to do is make sure that each of those purchases is large enough to make more than you spend on PPC — which isn’t difficult — and you’re in the black. No waiting around for a long-term SEO investment to kick in, no finding out too late that a keyword isn’t working out for you: you get your traffic, you earn for it, and then you pay for it. It’s the best way to get traffic to your website, bar none.*

(*SEO companies may disagree.)