Let’s find out!
But first, if you are not familiar with those terms, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – the art of making websites show up higher than your competitors on Google and other search engines. Meanwhile, PPC stands for Pay Per Click (Advertising) – the art of driving targeted traffic to your website, or customers to your business for a calculated cost on your side and ranking high instantly.
Which one is more expensive?
This depends on what you are planning to do. If your goal is to become a high ranking authority in your industry, SEO will be quite heavy on your bank account. Months of optimizing, dozens of offpage and onpage SEO edits and competiton research will just be the start. These days, Google loves good content. Knowing that, you shouldn’t forget to be a good spokesperson either. If you have something to say, say it. Search engines love blog articles, but good ones – therefore get ready to hire some experienced content creators on top of it.
Meanwhile, PPC will allow you to rank instantly. The first month will more than likely consist of data gathering, but after that? Optimizing and keeping your spot. With a good PPC expert, nothing should go wrong and if it does – you’ll regain your spot shortly even after a powerful competitor enters the market. How successful your campaign will be depends partly on your budget and the skills of your PPC specialist.
In short, while SEO will take up a lot of money without knowing if you’ll see the Return Of Investment when you need it, PPC is sure to give it to you – faster and more secure!
What’s the time difference?
As explained above, PPC can be show instant results whereas SEO takes a long time. Anyone who tells you otherwise is more than likely using blackhat methods (such as parasites and Web 2.0 manipulation) , which works in the short-term but will get your website(s) along with your account banned permanently, rendering all your hard work & budget useless. Is this truly something you want?
The reason for that difference is the fact that PPC is a straightforward procedure, whereas SEO is uncertain due to Google’s algorithm updates and the more than tough competition. With SEO it could take you years to outrank someone in a third spot in a competitive niche such as modern web app development, but with PPC you could outrank that website – in fact every website in that industry – by next month.