In a flat rate PPC, the advertiser and publisher mutually agree on the amount of money to be paid for each click. This negotiable rate is determined by the CPC, “Cost Per Click”. The CPC is a calculation based on different areas and aspects of the website such as, the content on the page. Content that has a large amount of valuable visitors will have an overall higher rate. The downfall of the PPC form of advertisement is that once you stop paying for the service, your benefits are over.

As opposed to Pay-Per-Click forms of advertisement, there is also Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is technique used to elevate a website through the ranks in SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages. Because Google runs on a “Natural” or “Organic” algorithm that determines their results, specific features and guidelines must be applied in order to gain an increasing number of visitors to your site.

With SEO you achieve increasingly better placement, and more visitors, almost immediately. The traffic comes continually, and the effects are long term and long lasting. Without SEO, your website may not be ranking high due to lack of keywords, or it may be too difficult for your target customers to find you and your product. Even after you are finished with SEO servicing, the work is already done and the benefits continue for a long time.

PPC average CTR(click through rate) is 15% – it varies in different markets but it has never topped 20%,
Organic average CTR is 98%.6 – it varies in different markets but it is never below 93.2%, example for PPC best scenario:
1000 users are searching for a phrase 932 are clicking on the organic listing.
1000 users are searching for a phrase 200 are clicking on the PPC listing.
Conclusion = an organic listing will receive 4.66 more traffic than an equal PPC listing.

Combination of examples:
932 users will go to the online store through organic and 93 of them will purchase = $930 in sales.
200 users will go to the online store through PPC and 48 of them will purchase = $480 in sales.
Conclusion = an organic listing is 1.93 more valuable than an equal PPC listing.

**IMPORTANT**
Facts to keep in mind:
• PPC is a competitive market that people are paying to be there, unlike organic results the most of the people are not paying to be there and most of them don’t even try to market their SEO, it is a basic logic fact the a person who is investing money in renting those PPC listings will invest much more effort and funds in the design of his landing pages than millions of small online stores who are not even trying to market their site – usually because of lack of funds. For example:
“sony headphones” has 8 PPC listings and 720,000 organic listings. do you think all the landing pages in the 720,000 organic listings are as good as the 8 PPC?

• An organic listing is like an online real estate property, if you are #1 for sony headphone you can sell you site with those listings for probably a lot of money, you can put ads/adsense on there to make passive income, or you can even hire a manager to run the store for you if the cost/benefit is in the right ratio. In our case it’s like the different between paying mortgage or paying rent, even if you pay for years to PPC – this property/listing is never yours and once you stop paying your listing will stop displaying.
Tom Light.
SEO Consultant,
InfoSearch Media.
310.437.7541
Tom@InfoSearchMedia.com