SEO vs. PPC - Sure, SEO Is Free, but PPC Is Scalable

I often here people debating this subject: should I focus on SEO or PPC?

Well, I would say, do both, but if you had to choose one..

I would go with PPC.

Why?

Those who support SEO would point to the fact that it is largely free, and why pay for clicks when you can get them for free. To them I say, absolutely, however if you are planning on running an operation that could become expandable in the future, then you would be better off to think about PPC.

SEO takes work. Work to get the keywords that you want in the first place, and work to maintain the keywords. You need to be constantly updating your content, constanting getting new links, or else you run the risk of your site becoming stagnant and dropping in the search engines. If your operation starts to become really big, then you need to worry about hiring people to write content, screening out thousands of potential spam comments, etc.

The cool thing with PPC is that once you find something that works, it largely runs itself. Let's say that you set up a landing page, a landing page that is going to sell life insurance. You concoct and tweak a campaign for a month, and discover that for every $1 you spend, you are making $2. Paydirt? Now, all you have to do is tweak your bids on a daily basis, and you are making money on a daily basis, for just a few minutes per day of effort. Multiply this by 20 campaigns, and boom, you are making money from 20 different places, and spending no more than 1-2 hours per day on the project.

Let's say that you are running 20 different SEO sites. Well, in order to remain high in the search engines, you need to be updating this content on an almost daily basis. This can be a lot of work? If you farm out this content, then you are looking at thousands of dollars per month in content acquisition fees. This can be expensive.

If you are a one man operation and plan on running one site, then absolutely SEO is the way to go. It's cheap, and when you are trying to keep your cost low, cheap is of utmost importance. However, if you have loftier goals, you should really look at PPC.