Paid traffic
Paid traffic is online traffic that is bought, commonly referred to as PPC (Pay-Per-Click), CPC (Cost-Per-Click), CPM (Cost-Per-1,000-Impressions) & CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition).
Benefits:
- Immediate results
- Unlimited keywords
- Keywords are flexible
- Daily budget can be easily controlled
- Paid traffic generally converts much higher than Organic
- More control over ad copy
- More control of ad placement
- Only small design and code changes required on the site
Disadvantages:
- The costs can increase as competition increases
- Certain verticals such as Real Estate and Travel can be very competitive
Organic traffic
Organic traffic can come from people typing-in your URL to a browser, finding you in organic search listings on sites like Google or seeing your link on 3rd-party sites. As you can’t directly buy organic traffic, there are ways to make your site more likely to receive it; this process is loosely referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Benefits:
- It’s Free!
- If you get to the top of the organic search results on Google for a popular keyword you can get incredible volumes of traffic
Disadvantages:
- Not instant, can be a time-consuming process sometimes requiring a major website re-design
- Ranking can not be estimated precisely
- Expensive to implement
- Ranking is subject to change without warning
- SEO is Voodoo; a mysterious and somewhat underground practice. This is because certain SEO practices are deliberate attempts to fool search engines
- Search engines (Google) frown on certain SEO practices because they can effect the validity of their organic listings
Related posts:
- Paid Search Ends 2008 On a Positive Note – Up 12%
- Google’s SEO guide
- Google’s Organic Results and Ads Merge…Kind Of.
- Want more website traffic?
- Google – Better ad texts, better performance
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, interest post. I’ll write you later about few questions!
Fire away!