Internet marketing refers to the act of promoting one’s business, products and services online. It is differentiated into two branches – the organic and inorganic – otherwise known as search engine optimization and pay-per-click. SEO (organic) involves non paid activities that help divert traffic towards a website and improve its visibility. Pay-per-click (inorganic) on the other hand encompasses preferential ranking on search engine page results for a fee.
Both of these web promotion methods are effective in terms of generating leads and improving a website’s competitiveness. But they also have strengths and weaknesses that make them compatible or incompatible for certain companies.
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Procedure. Pay-per-click is relatively easier than search engine optimization. To start it off, one will only have to create an ad, pick a set of keywords and pay to have them displayed on Google search engine result pages and websites. When there is a query that matches a keyword on your list, the ad will appear adjacent or above the organic results as well as anywhere on a relevant content site. As a result, it will be seen and clicked first by the searcher. With search engine optimization, one has to go through several on page and off page methods in order to get the website on the top of the hierarchy. By on page, that would entail adding some elements to the website (example meta tags) and enhancing features. By off page, that would mean link building through social bookmarking, article submission and social network marketing.
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Results. Pay-per-click produces immediate traffic since the website’s link will be prominently positioned on top of search results. With SEO, you need to wait a few months before pay-offs are felt. With the former, as long as you pay, you can guarantee yourself a slot within the top ten. The latter doesn’t give that much reassurance and will require you to maintain on page and off page campaigns in order to achieve some stability. A plus side of search engine optimization is that it is perceived to be more credible than PPC.
3. Costs. Organic internet marketing is essentially free. If you do it on your own, without expert consultation and the use of tools, you virtually don’t have to pay a single cent to enhance your business’ competitiveness. It does not discriminate between big and small companies. And it helps you expand your network, enhance your credibility and cross-over from web to real life along with increasing your site’s traffic. PPC, meanwhile, demands an investment of $20 to $1000. And with poor copywriting, a webmaster might end up paying more for the ad than what he earns from its contribution.
As you can see, SEO and PPC offer different and interesting advantages and disadvantages. Hence, once cannot readily conclude that the first option is better than the second. What you end up with will be a matter of preference. If you have the resources, you could maximize the whole campaign and apply the two. That way you get the best out of both worlds.
