I and my partner had a talk in the seminar at Matrade on 20th August 2007. The Seminar subject is "Effective internet marketing for manufacturer in Malaysia". It was organized by Exporter Club.
Beside me, Exporter Club also invited Hanson Toh, The one and only Google's country consultant appointed directly by Google Inc from USA.
I was so surprised to know there were many companies attended. One of the audience who is a foreigner purposely take a flight to attend the seminar just for the purpose to meet Hanson (Hey Hanson, you are famous now :p )
Hanson's topic mainly focus on PPC ( Pay per click ) or generally known as Google Adwords, while my topic mainly focus on SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) or organic search result.
Many people think SEO and PPC is competing each other, which I not agreed on it. In my opinion, there are co-exist and it is mutual compliment. Let's see the comparison of them :
Pros and Cons of PPC
Pros :
1. You get instant results. If you advertise your website on pay per click search engines, then you will get traffic now and not several months later.
2. PPC ads are perfect for time limited offers such as holiday sales.
3. You can stop PPC ads at any time.
4. PPC ads make it easy to test different keywords and landing pages.
5. PPC ads also work with websites that are not very well designed and wouldn't get good search engine rankings.
6. PPC ads allow you to bid on a large amount of keywords, including misspellings and other keyword variations that you cannot put on your web pages. i.e. “chili sos manufactuer” , “chili source manufacturer”
Cons :
1.PPC advertising can become very expensive if you bid on the wrong keywords or if you don't calculate the maximum bid price correctly.
2. Click fraud can be a problem. Not all clickers are potential customers.
Pro and Cons of SEO
Pros :
1.Traffic through organic search engine results is almost free if the up-front work has been done. 2.After optimizing your website you can use your money for different things and the optimized site will still run.
3.A larger number of visitors and search result clickers is not a problem.
4.Search engine optimization delivers long term results
Cons :
1.SEO can be relatively time-consuming up-front.
2.SEO can require a redesign of your web pages to make your website search engine friendly.
3.You must have the knowledge of SEO and make sure that you optimize your website correctly, if your want to get high search engine rankings.
Which is better : SEO or PPC ?
In my opinion, most commercial websites work best if you use both SEO and PPC. The exact mix depends on your goals. For example, if you have the products for short term promotion, or if you have many products to advertise online, it is better go for PPC, if you want to introduce your company or only few products for long terms, then you should go for SEO.
