Organic Ranking (SEO) vs. Sponsored ads (PPC); How to choose?
- Speed: organic ranking can take up to 12 months; sponsored ranking only takes 24 hours;
- Range: organic ranking is only possible for 10-15 keywords; sponsored ranking is possible for thousands of keywords;
- Stability: organic rankings can drop overnight with search algorithm changes; sponsored rankings are much more stable;
- Cost: organic rankings are free; sponsored rankings are paid per click, and can suffer from click fraud;
- Targeting: sponsored rankings can be shown per time of day or per geographic region; organic rankings cannot
- Media: sponsored ads can show rich media like banners and video ads, organic rankings basically only show text (though this is changing with Google universal).
- Audience: organic rankings are shown to all people, sponsored ads can be targeted per website (adsense style) and audience demographics (gender, age, income group).
SEO for a new website can take over 1 year to have effect, while SEO for established websites can generate faster ranking results, within 3-4 months. If you have a new website, we would advise to start with Pay Per Click (PPC, see menu) to generate traffic.
Factors determining an organic website ranking, also called SERP (Search Engine Result Page) include:
Source-code settings like website title, meta-tag description, meta-tag keywords, and picture ALT-tags;
Content settings like header(=h1, h2)-tags, content-text, and correct internal link anchor-texts;
Keyword settings like correct position in the website title, correct keyword-density, and correct use of the S/C (#search/#competitor) ratio of keywords.
Link settings like the number and page-rank of inbound (=back)links, correct inbound link anchor-texts, and correct Google Sitemap;
Domain settings like a correct DMOZ listing and the presence of correct keywords in the domain name and/or website page names, where applicable;
Age settings the website age is a factor in the ranking; websites younger than 6 months spend a long time in search-engine "sand-boxes"; being evaluated.
Penalty factors like hidden text, homepage re-directs, content-duplication and doorway pages should be avoided.
Organic
A Top 10 SE (search engine) natural rank is only targeted if the key phrase consists of at least 3 keywords, if the page concerned has a page-rank which equals a top 5 value (for the market segment involved) and if the page SEO parameters (name, title, header, alt tags) are correct.
