SEO has many advantages for businesses. It is important to bear in mind from the outset that SEO is not a pay for traffic strategy. In fact, this is one of its benefits in that you are not required to pay any money to a search engine in order to generate traffic.

Search engine optimization evolves around optimising a website so that organic ranking is achieved. This provides the opportunity to be clicked on by 75% of people who use search engines.

SEO has a huge reach over PPC in terms of who will actually click on an ad. SEO is also very versatile in that traffic is generated from many sources such as through blogs, article sites and even video marketing.

Search engine users are more trustworthy of clicking on an organic search listing rather than a paid search listing. Thus SEO is more creditworthy. By producing high quality relevant content then Google, for instance, will be likely to list your site and if good optimization has been carried out then you could very well find your site listed high on the search rankings.

Paid search is useful if you want to aim for immediate search results. For instance, you can create a new Google account, write some campaigns and be listed on Google all within a matter of 20 minutes, maybe even sooner than that. However, if you are looking to build online branding then paid search is probably not the way to go. SEO is a vastly superior way to build your site's online presence.

By optimizing a website through SEO, and bearing in mind that this should have been done very well, then the site user really just needs to monitor the effectiveness of the optimization. It can take anywhere from between 3 - 6 months to see the effects of the SEO taking prominence on the search engines. Some tweaking can be made during this period but it is wise not to do too much. Using search metrics in SEO is very important so that you can monitor the SEO results on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

Paid search requires constant monitoring because you can see the results immediately. You will know quickly whether your campaigns are working and whether adjustments are required. With PPC, as soon as your budget runs out then your campaigns will go offline. This is why constant monitoring is required. With SEO, it is the opposite in terms of SEO being a long-term project and your listings should not go offline, unless there has been a dramatic change in the search engine algorithm.

ROI is much more better with SEO in comparison to PPC. True, you may receive quicker results initially with paid search but over the long term SEO is well known to produce better results.

The key aspect with SEO, is that you need to ensure that your site has a well structured navigation. The whole site needs to be optimized and that all pages achieve good Page Ranks. With PPC, there is no requirement for this as you simply are paying for the benefit of status.

In conclusion, SEO requires a longer term planning strategy than paid search. Both have their benefits. If you are looking for fast results then paid search is possibly the way to go but if you are looking longer term and especially at branding your site then SEO is the clear winner here.

Kevin John is an online marketing and mindset coach.

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