Pay-per-click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model that helps businesses to attract traffic to their website. Unlike organic search engine optimization (SEO), PPC is a paid method. The advertiser has to pay either to the publisher (website owner) or to the search engines, based on the type of advertising model, only when the ad is clicked. Thus, the method creates a win-win situation for both the advertiser and the publisher.
For small businesses
For small and start-up businesses, 
PPC is an easy alternative to organic SEO. SEO is not only time-consuming, but also expensive compared to PPC. Small businesses are too thin in budget and may not afford to optimize their websites to make it search engine friendly. In case of start-ups, they need immediate results, which is possible only through this campaign.
Thus, PPC strategy helps small businesses appear on the top search engine result pages at low price and within a short span of time. By this, the traffic to the website increases along with the chances of getting potential customers to the business.
How it works?
For your website to make presence on the top, you should first find the search terms that your target audience use to find your business. These search terms are called “keywords”. In search advertising, owners of websites actually bid for these keywords. Whoever pays more will have their website on the top. As the number of website owners competing for the keywords increases, the cost for the keywords increases.
In contrast, content sites, charge a fixed cost per click instead of using the bidding model. PPC advertisements on these sites are displayed in the form of banners with related content.
How it helps small businesses?
PPC is also capable of fetching the good results without optimizing the website. It is helpful for small businesses in many ways. Some of them are
- Inexpensive
PPC ads are less expensive when compared to SEO and fetch same results as that of SEO. SEO is an expensive process and small businesses would not afford to allocate fat budget to the website and its optimization. Algorithms used for SEO change often and when they change, the website loses its ranking and might not top in the SERPs. This would cause additional expense for small businesses to optimize the websites again. Small businesses can avoid this all by choosing PPC.
- Speed
PPC ads can be launched very quickly unlike SEO. It is necessary for small businesses to kick-start its action of setting customers. Organic SEO may take more time to bring the website to the top position. But, PPC works in a very short time span, and thus enables quicker conversions.
- Return on investment (ROI)
Tracking and monitoring is easy in pay-per-click campaign and the return on investment can be easily calculated compared to other kinds of Internet advertising techniques.