We often get asked which traffic is better:  PPC or SEO, and what the balance between the two should be. There’s no short answer to this but, as this question keeps coming up from our clients and in our seminars, I would like to revisit the issue.

For the uninitiated, there are two basic ways of getting traffic to your site from Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines:  Search Engine Optimisation (where your site needs to be improved on an ongoing basis so that the search engines recognise it and rank it better on its own merits); and Pay per Click (where websites appear in search engines with short paid-for adverts).

Let’s start with Pay Per Click. As an advertising method it’s great – you pick the keywords you want to appear for, which, in effect, means that you choose who sees your advert.  This makes it far more targeted than traditional advertising methods. It has three benefits which make it especially worth adding to your advertising mix:

Pay Per Click offers quick traffic

While optimising a site can take anywhere from 6-12 months before you begin to see results, Pay Per Click is effective pretty much as soon as you set up the campaign.


Pay Per Click allows you to test keywords

Keywords can be confusing. If your keyword research is done correctly, you should have a huge number of potential keywords to consider, and a Pay Per Click campaign can show which of them are attracting the kind of customers you want, allowing you to organically optimise for them later.


Pay Per Click lets you test site conversion

Pay Per Click campaigns allow you to track how well your site is converting – how many people are booking a holiday, ordering a brochure or making an enquiry. This allows you to modify your site according to the response you are getting, optimising its performance to ensure the maximum percentage of visitors perform an action.

However, despite these positives, there are other factors which make it a less attractive proposition. For a start, certain demographics never click PPC adverts, and always choose organic search results. This can be due to a mistrust of sponsored links or simply because they are used to looking straight past them into the main (natural) listings, but for whatever reason your site may get no attention from them if it has no presence in the listings aside from PPC.

Another reason is the expense involved. Although the travel industry is not the most expensive for PPC costs, it is on the rise as more and more companies try to improve their internet presence. The nature of PPC is obviously that you pay for every single visitor to the site, which is something organic listings do not suffer from making them (after the initial time and expense involved in optimisation) a far cheaper option.

As mentioned earlier though, SEO is a long-term game. You won’t see real results for many months (at best), and to become truly optimised it will take a good deal longer. As a stop-gap measure, while improvements are made to the site, PPC is absolutely perfect. Once your SEO begins to take shape you can lower your PPC budget and allow your organic listings to do the talking. Initially for clients, we recommend a near 100% effort on PPC to get the ball rolling. From there, we like to see the effort slowly lowered and pushed towards SEO for cost reasons. Where the ratio ends will vary from client to client and will depend on the success and costs of each PPC campaign.  However, we would never recommend abolishing PPC altogether.  Just like there are people who never click paid listings, there are others who rarely step outside them.

All in all, like most things in business, it’s about the mix. One method is not better than the other, and each one attracts different kinds of traffic. Until things change, we will continue to recommend that our clients maintain a balance between PPC and organic optimisation to ensure a steady stream of well converting traffic.