Paying for advertising and optimizing a site for search engine rankings are two distinctly different marketing strategies.
When discussing whether or not to pay for advertising or gain exposure organically using search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques, the issue comes down to two things: time and money.
Paid advertising or PPC (pay per click) advertising only costs the advertiser when a prospective customer clicks on a link delivering a visitor to their website. Pay per click yields almost instant results; however, for it to continue to be successful, the website owner needs to continue paying for the click advertising rights. As soon as the ad is dropped, the revenue stream quickly dries up.
SEO while a potentially stronger method of advertising does require patience before you will see any results. All of the components must be put in place and given a chance to work; however, if you can muster the patience, there are some very distinct benefits to be found using SEO techniques on your website.
First of all there is the psychological advantage to the visitor of just seeing your website in the search results. Immediately this tells the visitor that your site made it to the head of the class on merit not because someone bought an ad. Organically placed search engine rankings must have decent content to even make the list, so a visitor knows immediately that your site contains worthwhile content.
SEO's keyword ranking in essence pre qualifies your visitors giving you quality traffic and a much higher rate of a conversion. It takes a lot of work and tweaking to get a website in the top rankings of a search engine, and once a website has made it to that top spot the work is not over. You can fall back a little into maintenance mode, but you still need to redo and retest constantly.
For the best results with your online marketing strategy it is probably best to employ both strategies, paid and organic. PPC gets you up and running and immediately drives traffic to your site while search engine optimisation brings up the back end of the marketing plan yielding residual effects. So at the end of the day neither method is right or wrong. The best answer lies somewhere in between.
You might also consider adding an email marketing strategy to your online business plan. Many companies choose to add a bulk email scheme to strengthen their existing newsletter distribution, or to invest in a good email marketing software to help launch a new arm of their promotion strategy.