This article originally appeared on the Spectrum blog. 

When it comes to your company's Internet marketing, is it best to allocate time and money to your search engine optimization efforts or your pay-per-click advertising?

Which is better for your business?

PPC is a fantastic surface-level way to get your business in front of potential customers almost immediately.

SEO is a deeper, more long-term investment that takes patience, time and dedication to effectively execute.

Both demand knowledge and experience. Neither is necessarily superior to the other. The popular contention, therefore, is that to make the most of an online marketing campaign, business owners must utilize both strategies in congruence. Here are 7 excellent reasons why:

KEYWORDS, KEYWORDS, KEYWORDS

Pay-per-click is a great place to test the keywords you plan to use in your SEO campaign. Targeting several different keyword phrases throughout multiple PPC ads will help drive traffic to your site that actually converts into revenue. Knowing this information will allow you to target only the most effective keywords throughout your SEO campaign.

HIGHER CLICK-THROUGH RATES, MORE CONVERSIONS

Most business owners cut their PPC ad spend as soon as their website achieves top organic rankings for their most relevant keywords -- mainly because they feel as though they'd get the organic click anyway so why spend the extra money? Right?

Actually… not exactly.

When both your paid and organic listings appear on the same search results page, searchers are more likely to 1) click through to your website and 2) convert once they're there. This is because a dual SERP occurrence conveys credibility as well as an established presence in your particular market.

BRAND RECOGNITION

This goes hand-in-hand with higher click-through rates and more conversions. When your website has both an organic and a PPC presence on a search engine results page, your company brand will become more recognizable and, in turn, gain the trust of consumers. 

COMPETITIVE EDGE

The more your presence is felt by consumers -- both organically and in pay-per-click -- the more your competition will struggle for their cut of the pie.

MORE DATA, BETTER ANALYSIS

Concurrently running a SEO and PPC campaign will yield twice as much data to review and analyze. With a larger data pool, you (or your marketing company) will be able to make more educated and impactful adjustments to your strategy as time goes by.

YOUR ADWORDS QUALITY SCORE WILL GO UP…

Your Adwords Quality Score will gradually improve if the pages you're sending clickers to have been properly optimized for SEO. Improving your quality score will lower your cost per click and result in better PPC placement for the ads you're running.

…SO WILL YOUR WEBSITE TRAFFIC

It can take search engines a fair amount of time to trust a freshly-launched website. A PPC campaign can supplement the work that crawlers do by sending a steady stream of traffic to your site -- building authority, egitimacy and clout with search engines.