which is better for driving traffic a classified website, SEO or AdWords?

I think this depends on what you business is trying to achieve currently.

SEO differs from PPC in the event that your website achieves its high-ranking position through organic search results. SEO’s return on investment will continue to rise and sometimes sustain value even after your budget has stopped. Think of it as paying on a long-term investment with a fixed monthly budget that is autonomous of the users click capacity. That way, even if someone stumbles on to your site by accident, your wallet won’t feel the repercussion of an accidental click. Research has also shown that users tend to trust organic search listings more than that of their paid counterparts. However,  in order for effective SEO strategies to become efficient, time is a vital element as well and ongoing upkeep for improvements.

A Pay-Per-Click campaign or PPC is when a business can pay to get visibility to your site by means of keyword bidding. I would have to say that the biggest upside of PPC is instant gratification. A PPC campaign can directly generate traffic and leads to your site. Additionally, data has been shown that traffic by virtue of PPC leads to more sales because the user is actively clicking on a product they are searching for. Furthermore, unlike SEO, PPC campaigns are secured when search engines update their algorithms; therefore no campaign changes are required.

You may even want to consider running both campaigns. There are many companies who offer both SEO and AdWords and often times when you combine the two, you can get a discounted rate. However, if you are performing the campaigns yourself, submerse yourself in knowledge because both can be quite costly if you don;t know what you are doing.

ou may find the cost per conversion is too high with Adwords, depending on how much you make per sale, but then again you could justify by saying that you're buying users. It depends on your business model - do you get money for each ad that's posted, each sale that's made or just from onsite advertising? If it's per sale you could work out the conversion rate and decide if Adwords is going to be worth it. Setup a dynamic search ads campaign as a test and see what works.

SEO certainly will be worthwhile and will need to be carefully considered due to your continually changing content - i.e. ads expiring and getting sold, new ads being placed at different URLs.

Note that SEO will be a much longer term investment than Adwords, but if Adwords is profitable, you should be able to successfully run both concurrently.

PPC and SEO both drives traffic but in a different way. SEO plays a part in the long term strategy for your free classified website. However with PPC there are so many campaigns you can do for your site.

PPC is not just search. It is also display, remarketing and also competitors targeting. This is really great as it allows you to have an instant effect rather than the long term play of SEO. This will generate traffic from users of other classified sites to your site instead.

AdWords hands down. With AdWords you can have almost immediate traffic — with SEO it could take “forever” these days.

Like it or not, Google has taken full advantage of being the 800 pound gorilla, and SEO is something that worked relatively well years ago. These days, it’s just a big mess, and the majority of people can’t even tell you what the best thing to do for SEO is that will actually get you solid results and not take “forever”.

If you get lots of people that claim exception to this view and tell you they can do this and do that, ask them for a guarantee; 99 out of 100 will most like shut up or run the other way.