Not sure where your marketing budget is best spent? Join a long list of online advertisers. To help you here are some Pros of PPC Advertising including Adwords, Facebook marketing & Linkedin marketing.

One of the biggest advantages of PPC advertising / Paid Media is that it gives your company a very fast start-up. Compare that to traditional SEO and you will have to wait for months to start getting traffic from search engine optimization.

When you set up a Paid media campaign, you start receiving traffic as soon as your campaign is approved by the advertising services.

Once your new marketing campaign has been approved as appropriate, the advertising service will start sending traffic your way until your budget is exhausted.

Another big advantage of Paid Media advertising or in this case Google Adwords, is that your ads are shown on the top of the search engine result pages which mean these are more likely to be clicked and you’re more likely to get highly targeted traffic. Since these PPC advertisements are at the top of the search engine result pages, the organic results get pushed down further.

Another advantage of PPC advertising is that it makes data tracking and other things extremely easy. Each of the parameters of the campaign can be recorded and analyzed at a later date to improve the performance of a PPC advertising campaign. Also, it’s extremely easy to edit a campaign. PPC advertising also allows you to target very specific regions including regions in your neighborhood, a specific city or a specific state or a specific country.

Cons of PPC Advertising

While there are a number of benefits of PPC advertising, it also has its cons. One of the biggest disadvantages of PPC advertising is that it takes a lot of money to get significant amount of traffic, especially when you’re in a highly competitive industry. Also, you only get clicks as per your budget. Once the budget is exhausted, you stop receiving any further traffic from the advertising networks.

You’ll also have to pay a very high price when you‘re in a competitive industry. The more competitive the industry the higher pay per click costs. In addition to buying PPC advertising, you also need to take into account the effectiveness of landing pages to get high conversion rates. There is no guarantee that the traffic required through PPC advertising will convert though the evidence suggests that a lot of people convert through PPC advertising.

Pros of SEO Advertising

One of the biggest advantages of search engine optimization/ SEO is that once the initial legwork has been done, it is almost free traffic. Unlike PPC advertising, you’re not required to pay money for every click driven to your website by the search engines. Once your website starts ranking for multiple keywords you’ll keep receiving high quality traffic from search engines. While your website ranks high for various keywords and phrases the traffic is limitless.

As far as search engine optimization is concerned, it does take some time to get results but once the rankings have been achieved using only white hat search engine optimization techniques, the rankings usually tend to stick. In simple terms, you’re not required to do constant efforts to achieve high rankings in the search engines as long as you comply with the guidelines issued by major search engines such as Bing and Google.

Another contributing factor that can affect your ranking is the software of your website. Always keep the software version upto date. Currently Google emails owners of wordpress websites to alert them when a new update is available. Has your software been updated lately?

A huge advantage of search engine optimization is that it delivers long-term return on investment. It has been observed that the return on investment when it comes to SEO advertising is much higher than PPC advertising in the long run. However, you need to have patience to get results.

Cons of SEO Advertising

While there are a number of advantages of SEO, it also has some disadvantages. One of the biggest disadvantages of SEO is that it takes a lot of time to get results. While you can start receiving traffic from PPC advertising as soon as your campaign is turned on, it usually requires months of hard work to get rankings in the search engines for desired phrases and keywords.

Another big disadvantage of search engine optimization is that it depends on the algorithmic updates by major search engines. Even if you have done all the hard work, your website may get penalized for no fault of yours due to the changes in the ranking algorithms. However, it has been observed that most of the times, rankings tend to stick if you do not break any rules defined by the search engines.

Overall, these are some of the major differences between SEO advertising and Paid media advertising. Each of these has their own benefits and it’s usually preferable to use both strategies to a get good amount of targeted traffic to your website.