PPC pros

• PPC is the quickest way to appear at the top of the SERP.  Businesses pay to appear in a prominent position, generating instant visibility and traffic and, hopefully, instant sales and conversions. It works well for new products and new businesses, which haven’t had time to achieve a first page listing on search engines like Google or Bing.
• PPC can work very well and be cost-effective for a small local business targeting a small geographical area with a small number of keywords.
• PPC works well for products which need less research, which will often be lower value, higher volume items.
• If your main business goal is brand awareness, PPC can give your business immediate visibility.
• PPC gives you a lot of control over your messaging and targeting. This means you can target your ads to reach the exact demographic of your ideal buyer – from geographical location to industry type, age, gender, interests and more -  so your ads get seen by the right people at the right time, maximising your ROI. And if your ads aren’t working, you can change the content at short notice within your budget.
• PPC gives you access to analytics so you can really track the performance of each individual ad and calculate your ROI. This means you can identify what works and what doesn’t, so you can allocate your budget to achieve the best possible results.
• Advertisers have full control of their own PPC budget and can set daily or monthly spending limits. They can also adjust bids for specific keywords and pause campaigns when they want to.

PPC cons

• PPC requires constant investment. It can be quite expensive, especially if you are bidding on a keyword popular with other businesses. Then you have to ask yourself whether you are really getting the ROI you want, particularly if the ad is for a low value product.
• PPC is a short-term strategy – if you stop paying, your business will immediately disappear from searches. So your choices are either to start relying more on SEO or to keep paying for your ads!

SEO pros

• SEO doesn’t incur direct costs per visit. If you can manage SEO within your business, it is ‘free’, with the only cost being staff time. A well optimised blog can bring visitors to your website for many years, saving money and reducing your reliance on paid ads.
• Although paid ads will appear higher on searches than organic search results, visitors will usually trust organic searches more than adverts, so investing in SEO to get higher on searches could be a worthwhile investment.
• SEO has long-lasting benefits. If your business can rank highly on Google or other search engines for relevant keywords, it can stay there for a sustained period of time, much longer than a short-term advertising campaign.
• SEO creates high quality leads, as visitors will engage and read a lot of content before making a decision to buy.
• Good SEO can improve your ROI over time – as you continue to produce optimised web content, your website will rise in the rankings, leading to more clicks and increased traffic.

SEO cons

• SEO doesn’t bring instant results. It can take weeks and often months for search engines to crawl and index your website before it appears high up on SERPs.
• There is no guarantee of success and, for competitive keywords especially, you may never see your website rank on the first page of Google.
• If you need to outsource your SEO work, it can easily be just as expensive as PPC.
• It is harder to track and calculate the ROI of SEO.
• Search engines often change their algorithms without warning. This means something which ranked well yesterday is suddenly not as effective today, with your website plummeting in the rankings overnight. Staying on top of the changes in SEO can be time-consuming and costly.
  

New Paragraph