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Many businesses spend a ton of money on pay per click (PPC) advertising.

Let’s take Google for example, if you head to Google.com and perform a search, ads appear at the top and sides of the search results.  These ads are known as “ppc”.

Don’t get me wrong, paying for ppc can be a great way to get immediate traffic to your website and business.  There are a few problems with ppc though, and why it usually isn’t a recommendation I give to businesses interested in a long-term search engine placement:

Short-term Results:

If you want to get your website on the first page of Google, you have to pay for it.  This means that the second you stop running PPC ads, your results will stop as well.

PPC Can Be Very Expensive: Often times you will have to pay a relatively high price for every “click” you get.  It can be upwards of a few dollars for each visitor you get, depending on the competitiveness of your market and area.

PPC can be Confusing:  If you don’t know what you are doing when you start advertising on PPC, you can end up paying for ads that are irrelevant, costly, and ineffective.  That’s bad news!

People are Putting More Trust into the Natural Results: The experienced internet user is well aware that the results at the top of the search page are in fact ads, and will avoid these like the plague, focusing on the natural results below.

When I work with businesses, I strongly suggest taking a long-term approach and focusing on getting the website in the natural search engine results.

PPC is great if it is getting results for you, but I’ve found that getting results from the natural search results is far more beneficial, for many reasons.