Organic vs. PPC
Paid listings can show up instantaneously, however, each visitor is going to cost you. Sponsored listing run on a pay-per-click model. Meaning you can be in any position you want for any keyword you target. But at the same time you'll be bidding against other websites that want the same positions. Each keyword has different bid prices depending on the engine, industry, keyword and website. Say you want to rank #1 for the term "New York Car Dealership", chances are you will be competing with 20 - 1000 other websites for that position. Currently the average cost per click for the 1st position for that term is ~$42.59. It's not always that expensive. A similar term "car dealers in nyc" is only ~$3.96 a click. Meaning for every person that visits your site, you’ll be paying $3.96 or $42.59 per visitor to your site. So if you want thousands of visitors to visit you site, it can be very costly. But if you have a good site and product, it can be profitable.
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Now SEO is a whole another arena even though they share the same search engine ranking pages. Organic listings are what Google has chosen to be the most relevant to the keyword queried. So instead of who ever has the most money it's who ever has the most relevant content or the most links. Visitors that find your site through the search engines are free. All search engine traffic that comes to you site naturally wont cost you a thing. EXCEPT for whatever it took to get to that position. The
only downfall to SEO (compared to PPC) is that it takes more time. Contacting other websites and writing content to submit all over the net is very time consuming.
It's up to you. Do you want to be number 1 today and get charged an arm and a leg or do you want to create a site that actually deserves to be in that top position. While the sponsored listings' number 1 site is probably bidding the most, the number 1 organic listing is arguably the best site for that keywords industry. As bids wars increase and average cost per click rises in pay-per-click programs, more and more people turn to an SEO specialist
like me. |