This is quite a question and one that I believe depends on what market you are in and what you need to achieve from your website, if you have a long term view and you are time rich but cash poor then Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is with out doubt the way to go, you will not see dramatic results over night but in a few months you can get significant extra traffic by ensuring your site is set up properly for the search engines to crawl through and index.

If however you have a good budget and need to see immediate results then Pay Per Click (PPC) may be the best way to go, it will send visitors to your site from day one and with the statistics packages available you will be able to see the ads that resulted in conversions and the ones that were ignored by visitors.

This brings us to another important down side of PPC and that is that Ad blindness is worse than ever Comscore, the marketing research company shows that 16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web, so the vast majority of visitors from your PPC ads may well have clicked before, this may not be a huge problem if the sales levels are good but it is a disturbing trend.

Asking if it is best to spend more on Pay Per Click (PPC) or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a little like asking if you would like cake or ice cream, it normally depends on the circumstances at the time.

Pay Per Click is a great way of getting an instant boost for your company, getting the traffic in through the doors when the site is new so that you can test to see how popular the products or services you are selling are going to be, using relatively mall amounts of just a few hundred pounds you will be able to gage if people are interested in what you are promoting.

Once you know they are interested you can begin your marketing in full force, increasing your Pay Per Click budget and bringing in SEO for the site, Search Engine Optimisation is a longer term strategy than the PPC, but it does have the advantage of continuing to run even when you have stopped paying for it, although if it is stopped prematurely in a competitive market you can see the good positions drop quickly.

You are a little limited with the terms you can promote for with PPC as budget is always a concern, but with SEO you can promote for as many phrases as you like and you will find you are being found for phrases you did not even know were of interest to your visitors.

Rather than using PPC or SEO you should be using a combination of the two so that they complement each other as you move your marketing efforts forward, testing new markets with the PPC and promoting your site into the profitable niches using SEO.

Many businesses can get stuck in old habits and methods and many are almost afraid of trying new advertising and marketing media.  Many small to medium sized businesses are happy to spend vast amounts of their marketing budget on direct mail, television and magazine and newspaper advertisements with often no idea of how effective they are.  The truth about these sort of advertisements are that yes they can work but there are a number of limiting factors.  

You can spend vast amounts on a TV or magazine advert and find that it has a negative impact on your business because the audience didn’t react in a positive way towards your message.   The other thing is how can you measure the effectiveness of the advertising.  A magazine can say they have 500,000 readers a week but there is no guarantee that those readers are going to see your quarter page advert.  A direct mail campaign may deliver your flyer to around 80,000 homes but how many of those flyers will make it any further than the bin?  There is no real way to measure the effectiveness of your advert.

With search engine optimisation and PPC you are bringing your product to the customer rather than trying to bring the customers to you.  What I mean by that is there is already a demand for the product or service you’re offering and you are simply bringing your product to the customers attention by putting it in front of them.  In theory it should be easy to sell your product or service.

The other advantage of SEO and pay per click is that you can see exactly how many people have come through your online advertising, if it converted to a sale and at what point they left your site.  You can even see which key phrases your website was found for and whether the PPC or organic SERPs brought in the customer.  All of these things can not only show how effective your SEO and PPC have been they also allow you to improve your advertising.

You may have found that you are getting a lot of people clicking on your sponsored links but it is not resulting in sales.  This could be for a number of reasons either your advert isn’t descriptive enough or your prices are higher than the potential customers expectations.  This means you can perform split testing and try different adverts perhaps one with a price in would detract those customers before they click on your link saving your advertising budget.

The truth of the matter is that the best way is to combine a number of marketing techniques together as this will help build brand awareness.  That said any business that is looking to trade online would be foolish to not use SEO and PPC to promote their website online.