What's the Difference Between Pay-per-Click and Organic Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine positioning comes in two flavors - pay-per-click advertising and organic search engine rankings. Either one can get you a front page listing, and both will deliver traffic to your web site, but there are definitely differences between the two. Those differences may help you determine just which proportion of your internet marketing budget you sink into each kind of advertising or marketing efforts.

What it is:
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a type of paid advertising through search engines, most notably Google. PPC schemes allow you to pay for your listings to be displayed in the search results when someone types in particular keywords. Generally, PPC ads appear separately from links generated by organic search results.

Organic SEO rankings are those generated naturally in the search results. Organic SEO depends upon having good, useful content on your site and arranging it in such a way that both site visitors and search engines find it easily. It is made up of good content written with attention to keyword density, incoming links from other authoritative sites, outgoing links to other authoritative sites, meta tags and other structural site modifications and good publicity.

Cost
Both pay per click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization will cost you money - the difference is in how it is allocated. PPC is exactly what it sounds like - you'll pay for every click that is directed to your web site. Depending on which search engine you use (and most internet marketing specialists will tell you to work with the top three - Google, Yahoo and MSN), you'll either pay a fixed cost for each click, or the cost will vary depending on the popularity of the keyword and other factors.

Organic SEO, on the other hand, costs you out of pocket up front. You pay for the optimizations when they're done, whether they bring the desired results or not. Good SEO will bring results, though, and often better results than PPC advertising. Organic SEO costs may include paying writers for content, paying for incoming links and paying an SEO company for consultation and work.

Positioning
PPC generated search results are usually displayed differently than organic search results. On Google, Yahoo and MSN, they're listed in a light blue shaded box at the top of the first page in a 'Sponsored Results' section, and along the right side of the search result pages, also labeled 'Sponsor Results'. Some of the search engines add a third 'sponsored results' section at the bottom of the page as well.

Organic SEO results are listed in the main section of the page and take up most of the page real estate

Conversion Rates/Effectiveness
A number of factors affect the effectiveness of organic SEO and PPC search results. It's a general rule of thumb that organic search results offer higher click-through rates and higher conversion rates. There are lots of reasons for that, among them that people trust unpaid results more than they do paid advertisements.

Time
PPC ad campaigns often deliver immediate results. It can take as little as a day or two to set up a PPC campaign, and have clicks coming through to the site within a few days. Those results only last as long as you keep paying for the ad, though, and often, the initial high click-through rates will drop off in a short time.

Organic SEO campaigns may take months to show consistent results, but those results often are long-lasting. If a web site reaches the top of the search engine rankings in its field through building a good reference site, then it's likely to stay at the top of the results for a long time.

Many excellent SEO companies suggest a combination of PPC and organic SEO strategies to take advantage of the strengths of both. An initial high investment in PPC advertising can snowball as the site grows its reputation among site visitors.

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