Everyone in the internet marketing business is on a constant quest to find the most inexpensive way to get traffic to their site so they can start making money. To that end, we constantly hear people asking which is more affordable: SEO or PPC? The answer, as you might expect, is more complicated than you really want it to be.

The problem is that ‘affordable’ means different things to different people. Let’s say, for example, that you came to the table prepared and you started your online business with $10,000 cash in the bank to get started with. You can easily spend $2000 on a high-quality website and another $1000 on content — but you’ve still got plenty left over to live on while you shell out another $1000 each month on killer SEO. You can afford to wait a little while for customers, but when your money runs out you’re going to need the best traffic-per-dollar that you can get.

You want to invest in SEO.

On the other hand, let’s say you’re doing online business on the side while you work a 9 to 5 job. You don’t have a lot of money up front, but you’ve set aside $150/week to spend developing your online business. You need your profits back right away or your expenses will outpace your ability to spend. You’re not as concerned with traffic-per-dollar, but you are definitely interested in a speedy return.

You want to invest in PPC — specifically, in a PPC management firm.

Of course, you may be in a position to do both, and there’s nothing wrong with that — SEO and PPC are perfectly good neighbors and they work well together. The PPC brings in immediate, consistent, targeted traffic while the SEO builds up to a point at which it can sustain your business, at which point you can drop the PPC in favor of your own natural, organic traffic.

But when the final analysis comes in, the question of SEO being more or less affordable than PPC depends entirely on your financial situation. Based on the market numbers (80% of the money spend on search engine marketing goes to PPC and only 20% to SEO), most companies are looking for that quick return, even if it’s more expensive up front than SEO.

PPC management is pretty much the only smart way to go about pay-per-click marketing unless you’re willing to sacrifice quite a bit of time and money on the altar of learning by trial and error. But even among PPC management firms, there are some that quite simply win harder and more often, and it turns out that in the vast majority of cases it comes down to a single factor: the quality of the firms’ keyword research.

The Foundation of Internet Marketing
It’s no exaggeration to say that keyword research is the single defining factor of good marketing online. Every kind of Internet marketing, from organic SEO to pay-per-click marketing, relies on keyword research to establish how it will move forward. Keyword research, for the record, simply means the process of examining the mathematical attributes of short phrases in order to determine which of them will be most profitable to target with your efforts, whatever they may be.

PPC counts double
When you’re talking about pay-per-click marketing, keyword research is actually even more important than it is for any other form of Internet marketing. That’s because there are two monetary elements to PPC: how much you pay for each visit and how many paying visitors that keyword brings in. SEO only has the second one. So when you research SEO keywords, you have to make sure they’re solid buying keywords — but when you research PPC keywords, you have to do that AND make sure that you’re not paying more than you’re making for each successful sale.

Keyword Research Isn’t Easy
Not only is keyword research critically important for a PPC management firm, but it’s actually quite difficult to do correctly. There are a lot of different elements to balance when creating a keyword set to run a PPC campaign on — but equally importantly, a single PPC campaign (and often should) have hundreds of keywords associated with it. SEO has the relative luxury of focusing on a few keywords at a time. PPC management firms — at least the good ones — often come up with nearly a thousand different long-tail keywords before they have the hundred or so usable ones they need to do their work.

In short, the single most important aspect of any PPC management firm is the quality of their keyword research. Talk to your candidates about it before you hire anyone.

No one is arguing the fact that you need traffic in order to be successful online. End of story. But where you get your traffic from; now that’s a debate that will rage for ages. Proponents of organic SEO claim that the cost per visit in the end is much less than from a more direct form of traffic purchase, primarily pay per click marketing. PPC management firms, on the other hand, claim that SEO is hampered by high entrance costs made worse by a lack of return.

The truth is, they’re both right.

Cashflow or Cash Efficiency?
The two competing economic drives for any entity — but they are particularly pressing for small businesses — are cash flow and cash efficiency. Think about it like a grocery store: you can buy a small package today for a small amount, but the cost-per-pound will be high; or you can by a big package today for a bigger amount, but the cost-per-pound is lower, so you actually save money in the long run.

In this scenario, pay-per-click advertising is like buying those small, high cost-per-pound steaks. You purchase 1.5 lbs. of meat for $4.98, and you’re happy to do it because you only have $10 in your pocket, so you can’t afford to pay less than $2.99 per pound. SEO is like buying a Family Pack — you buy 12 lbs. of meat for $15.78, and you’re happy to do it because you’re only paying $1.49 per pound.

Traffic Now or Traffic Later?
This works because, in PPC, you only pay when someone clicks through. That means, if your conversions are decent, you should make a sale for every 50 or so times you have to pay for a click — in short, you make your money as you spend it, so you have better cashflow even if your cash efficiency sucks.

With organic SEO, however, you’re essentially investing — you pay $400 this month for 3000 visitors that trickle in over the next three months. Your cost per visitor is quite low, but the cost is all up front and the income is all a long ways off. If you don’t have the financial backing to stay in business for those few months, SEO simply won’t work for you.

In short, the answer is that SEO isn’t actually better than buying traffic — not for everyone. Different business in different circumstances will find one preferably over the other, but neither is clearly superior overall.

Some of you are smirking right now, and some are wondering what happened to my spellchecker and when I could have meant to spell when I wrote ‘Stig’. All I can say is, look it up. The important thing to know is that he’s fast. So is the traffic that hits your website when you find a good PPC management firm and drop some cash on pay-per-click marketing.

There’s a lot of people disrespecting PPC right now, and the numbers appear pretty dire. Studies say that 80% of the money spent on search engine marketing is spent on PPC — the other 20% is spent on SEO. Then they tell you that 80% of search engine traffic comes from SEO — the other 20% comes from PPC. Sounds like someone’s been studying the Pareto Principle, doesn’t it?

Here’s the thing — the numbers are right, but the interpretation of the numbers is flawed. The basic assertion is that each visitor from PPC costs about four times more than each visitor from organic SEO, and that’s absolutely true. But look at the difference between the two.

When you pay for SEO, you’re paying now for visitors that won’t come for months. It’s not a purchase, it’s an investment. And yes, you’ll get a few visitors for the cost that you’ll pay for a single click of PPC. But the biggest problem that startup web businesses have isn’t cash — it’s cashflow. Your income has to be greater than your outgo on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis.

PPC doesn’t give you cashflow problems the way SEO does. SEO demands a few — or several — hundred dollars right now, and doesn’t give you a shred of payout for as much as half a year. In fact, it demands that kind of investment month after month with no payout until the victory bell rings and you score that coveted first page placement.

PPC, on the other hand, gives you your traffic the same day it takes your money. Your conversions happen immediately, which means (if your PPC management team has set things up correctly), you’ll make more money than you spent — and in modern web-based business, that’s the definition of success.

There’s a reason why first page placement, or more specifically top-three placement for any given keyword, is the goal of every legitimate SEO company in the world. Simply put, if you can’t get your website listed in the top three entries of any given keyword, you’re not getting the traffic that keyword could be giving you — not by a longshot.

Lots of SEO companies offer a first page placement service. Some of them advertise that they’ll get you there through pay per click marketing (sponsored placement) and others by a massive organic SEO campaign (backlink building). Either way, you’re literally spending money in order to get traffic in the hopes that the traffic you get will earn you more money than you spent.

The difference is in timing and amount. If you go for PPC marketing, you’re going to spend a lot of money all at once, and you’re going to get your traffic instantly. You’ll have to make more money per click than you spend in order to show a profit, and depending on how you choose your keywords, that can be surprisingly difficult.

If you pull it off, you’ll be right back on the wire again next month, as the next month of marketing budget gets put up on the PPC lottery. This process continues for as long as you choose to stick with the instant-traffic, constant-risk model of pay per click marketing.

The other option, organic SEO, is the turtle in the turtle-and-the-hare story. You pay money, and nothing happens. You pay some more money, and nothing happens. You may some more money, and you see a trickle of traffic. You pay enough money over enough time, and suddenly you have top-three rankings for some badass keywords. More traffic than you can handle descends upon you, and you’re rich. All you have to do is live long enough for all of those payments to kick in.

Of course, if you have the cash, you could do both — both is definitely the best bet. But not all of us have that kind of funding hanging around, so it’s up to each of us to decide which route to success is going to be the easiest for our lifestyles to support.

Sometimes, you know you’ve got a great website, but the world just doesn’t. Maybe you don’t know how to get on Google’s good side, or your choice keywords are dominated by powerful websites that you won’t be able to upset without months of organic SEO that you can’t afford. Whatever the reason, you might be on the verge of giving up — don’t. There’s one more route you need to explore before you throw in the towel: pay per click marketing.

Some of you just read that and very nearly clicked away. There’s a good reason for that — pay per click marketing has a horrible reputation as a place where profitable webmasters go to throw thousands of dollars down a hole, never to be seen again. There’s a good reason for that, too: PPC marketing is an extraordinarily complex subject, and if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, it’s easy to get it incredibly, absolutely wrong.

PPC Management
That’s why many highly qualified experts have taken to offering PPC management services. These talented individuals know the pay-per-click market inside and out — most of them advertise on one PPC platform or another — and they are willing to put that expertise to use for you, for a fee.

Wait? A fee?
Of course, a fee. You didn’t think this was going to be entirely without cost, did you? No, you’re going to have to pay the PPC manager, and you’re going to have to pay ‘per click’ as well. But don’t panic! Even if you don’t have a lot of cash at the moment, if you’re website really does turn visitors into money, a skilled PPC manager will make you back his cost and then some within a month.

The Benefits
You see, PPC traffic is instant. You set up a PPC campaign, and you start getting hits the very next day. So long as your website is turning visitors into money at a greater rate than the PPC costs are rising, you’re gold — and one of the things that a PPC manager does well is keep your PPC costs down without impacting the quality of traffic.

If you’re website is on the verge of collapse, don’t walk away — at least not without giving it the best chance you can to turn around and become a performing asset. That means finding talented PPC management and letting them do their things.

First page placement for some high-volume keywords: that’s the bread and butter of every single business online. But it’s a lofty goal if you’re a novice webmaster; it can seem impossible to obtain for any keyword worth having.

Of course, that’s why keyword research is the most important part of any website’s functional lifespan, but that’s neither here nor there. The point here and now is that any website can achieve first page placement — it’s just a question of whether you have time, money, or both.

Time
Having time means you can afford to wait a while for your first page placement. It means that you can invest time in creating your own backlinks, and then wait for months while those backlinks slowly build your website up further and further on the SERPs until you reach the front page.

Money
If you have money (and no time), you can obtain instant first page placement using the Sponsored Links section of any given major search engine. In order words, you hire a decent PPC management team to get your website onto the first page of the search engines by bidding on keywords and putting up sponsored advertisements.

Both
If you have both, you can pursue both plans at once — get a pay pre click campaign going for instant money, and then sit back and work on your backlinks and other SEO until you start getting some significant organic traffic flowing. Once you’ve achieved that, you can choose whether or not the PPC management is bringing in enough money to warrant keeping it up, or if you want to drop it and run with just the organic traffic.

Of course, it goes without saying that there is no “neither” option. If you’re a typical startup entrepreneur that’s already investing all of your time and money into your website, you’re going to have to sacrifice something in order to get onto the first page. It might hurt a bit up front, but once you commit to doing whatever it takes to achieve that front page placement — and you succeed — you’ll find that it was well worthwhile.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, one of your websites that’s been pulling in regular money for some time simply stops. On the extreme end, it got sandboxed, but often it’s something less than that. Perhaps a competitor managed to outrank you for a crucial keyword, or maybe an ad that’s been bringing in a lot of traffic is against the ad hoster’s latest TOS. Whatever the reason, when a website unexpectedly stalls, there’s one easy way to get it profitable again quickly: an Adwords campaign headed by a talented PPC management team.

Many webmasters are scared sockless of pay per click advertising, either because they had a bad experience with it or they’ve had some guru tell them horror stories. What no one will admit is that, with correct PPC management, Adwords (or any of the equivalents on the lesser search engines) can be the only way to pull profit out of a profitless site.

You still need conversions, of course — if your website stalled out because you changed something that dropped your conversions from three percent to half a percent, change it back — but if you’re converting well and what you need is fast, targeted traffic, PPC is your cash cow. Many people will tell you to avoid it because you don’t want to pay “that much” for traffic, but the truth is that a talented PPC management team can keep the costs down (even given their own fees) while keeping the traffic up.

You can improve the situation even more by improving conversions with a Web Presenter or a carefully organized Targeted Email Marketing campaign — after all, traffic from PPC is just like traffic from any other targeted source.

Just remember that PPC is like health care: you do, eventually, want your website to be walking without the Adwords crutch. For that, you’ll need to pursue an aggressive strategy of organic SEO and make sure that your natural traffic starts to flow again. Until that point, however, you’re far better off with a solid PPC management crew driving profits than you are letting your website languish on the bed, slowly dying.