Both strategies, SEO and PPC cost money to get traffic to your site. The difference is that for SEO you pay people to get your website free organic traffic. But problem is that happens over time. It may take a year for results to show. For PPC, you pay the service provider, you pay for ads and you get immediate results. This might give a certain feeling that PPC is the way to go. But SEO experts think otherwise and that the best way forward is to use the two together.

Good things about PPC

• You can pick your keywords and build the ad around it
• PPC generates immediate traffic and gets you instant exposure, possibly on the first page of search results.
• You can target people who are searching for similar products.
• You can choose the time, geographic location and position on the page.
• You can target geographic locations and track data.

Bad things about PPC

• You pay for every click. People may simply click through without any intention of buying.
• PPC results show up in search results and it faces stiff competition
• There is no guarantee that even finely crafted ads can lead to conversions.
• Your ad, and therefore your company, is visible so long as you have an ongoing PPC campaign. Suspend it, and you go off the radar.
• PPC does nothing to enhance your reputation

Good things about SEO

• Search engines rank your website based on your search engine optimization strategies. Some visitors may prefer such listings to PPC and are more likely to click through, especially when they wish to obtain more information.
• Even if you suspend SEO operations for a while, your presence is there on search engines.
• Keep pushing it and SEO will result in the increasing volume of organic, convertible traffic. Plus, you establish a robust online presence and reputation and keep improving with the passage of time.

Bad things about SEO

• It requires a good  website to serve as the base of SEO operations.
• It is not easy to get to the first page and the first five at the top of it. It is much harder to keep that position.
• It takes time ranging from 6 months to a year for your site to show up on the first page of search results and if you are not doing it alone, you are paying SEO people to keep working on your website regardless.

Mixing SEO and PPC

SEO is excellent and so is PPC. The smart thing that expert marketers do is to mix the two together. PPC gives you analytics on keyword performance and keywords used in searches. So use that data for improving your SEO keyword content. Or vice versa, SEO experts are likely to conduct research and then decide keywords for the SEO campaign. Use those keywords in your PPC campaigns because these keywords have been clicked and converted. Lets say you start a PPC campaign. Visitors search using keywords and your ad shows up and they click through. You get data on their behavior on your website and that helps you to modify websites to lead to longer, better engagement.

Analytics show results of pages that generate most revenue. You can focus on these pages as well as others that need improvement. Keyword research tools can maybe help you make an educated guess about which keywords to use in your SEO, but PPC reports are data driven. You can create SEO plan using keywords that have actually delivered traffic. Which is actually showing us that it might be best to use PPC first to get raw data and quick results and then use that data to build your website for a long run results of SEO building.