Optimizing your website’s content for search engines costs about half as much as relying solely on a paid-search campaign for getting customers to your site. So says a recent study by Frommer’s Unlimited I read about in the Travolution article, “WTM: Rich content ‘more cost-effective than PPC’.”

Of course, the main flaw I saw in this study is that it analyzes SEO and PPC results separately when many ecommerce companies use a combination of the two. SEO and PPC have different strengths and weaknesses. SEO is slower but more cost-efficient while PPC is fast, but each click costs money.
It’s essential for a website’s long-term future for it to have strong content that is designed to attract search engines’ attention and increase its ranking in their search results. But that doesn’t mean PPC is irrelevant or too expensive for companies to take advantage of in their Internet-marketing campaigns.
According to Frommer’s study, it costs about 17 cents per visitor to optimize a site’s content. On the other hand, it costs about 33 cents per visitor through PPC ads.
You can find the rest of this blog entry in the Submit Solution Paid Search Blog on November 24, 2009. It will be entitled, “PPC clicks cost more than SEO.” The photo of the SEO, PPC Scrabble game is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of therichbrooks.
Tags: Ecommerce, Paid Search, PPC, search engine, search engine optimization, SEO, study, Submit Solution, website