I have come across a few debates online over the question “Can PPC outperform Organic SEO?”. Some of the results have been quite interesting. As an online marketer, you may wonder if one does outperform the other. Our recommendation is to use both since PPC can provide an instant boost of traffic and Organic SEO delivers long term traffic.

On reading some of the points you could come away with the feeling that PPC outperforms Organic SEO in most areas. In some ways it does too except when it comes to cost. For some keywords, long term SEO can be a much better performer. PPC does have some distinct advantages, particularly for new sites.

PPC will provide almost instant traffic and that traffic will be fairly targeted if you’ve used the right keywords. PPC is also a good tool for testing keywords to see which ones convert more than others. This can then be linked to an Organic SEO program to target traffic based on high converting keywords.

Where PPC is going to gain an advantage over Organic SEO in the future is in areas where search is becoming blurred. This is starting to happen now with search engines such as Google basing search results on user habits rather than pure relevance to the search term itself. Ranking highly for a particular keyword may soon mean nothing if that keyword has a lot of variable results.

Over time, the benefits gained by PPC can start to diminish as organic search results start to appear. What hasn’t been factored into this argument is social media marketing (SMM). The long term solution is to undertake a holistic approach to online marketing where PPC, SEO and SMM are combined together. For most online businesses, holistic online marketing will, over time, outperform any single approach.