I get this question a lot and I’ve answered it over the phone and through email many times but surprisingly, I’ve never addressed it here so here we go.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which is the ability to get a website listed on the first page of the Google natural rankings. By natural rankings I mean the free listings so when people click on your link you get free traffic to your site.

PPC stands for Pay per Click and that is a different beast. You can pay to have your ad appear on Google or other search engines and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Hence the name.

Ok, marketing jargon out of the way, what is the best approach for the small business owner to take? On first blush, it seems obvious. Go for the SEO and get all kinds of free traffic. Why pay for visitors when you can get them for free, right?

Well… here is the truth of the matter. Depending on your market and competition getting listed in Google’s top 10 can be quite challenging. It is also very difficult to get a site listed for more than four or five search terms – unless you want to add hundreds and hundreds of pages of content to your site. It has been my experience that most business owners simply don’t have time to do this. Yes, it can easily be outsourced but that is another topic altogether.

On the other hand, with PPC you can target thousands of search terms with the same amount of effort as just a few… if you set things up and manage everything properly. And as long as your monitoring your campaigns and ads to make sure that they’re profitable (ie. generating more profits than they’re costing you in clicks) it only stands to reason that you want as many visitors as possible to visit your site.

So my recommendation is to do both. Any SEO campaign will take some time (one week to four months depending on your effort and market) to get serious traction with Google anyway so you might as well use Pay per Click while you’re ramping up.

PPC is so much more valuable than just its ability to drive immediate traffic. After a short period of time, it will show you the search terms that are most profitable for you. Those are the terms that you want to target with your SEO efforts.

As long as you’re monitoring your PPC results, this is a fool-proof approach. As your SEO efforts take hold for specific terms, you can remove those terms from your PPC campaign – or you may choose to leave them in and have two or more listings on Google.

Of course, this whole approach falls down if you’re not measuring the results of your online efforts. Don’t just shoot in the dark. It takes a bit of time to monitor the results but that time will more than pay for itself in lower click costs, better keyword targeting and ultimately, a more profitable website.