The Answer Is – You Should Do Both
Organic Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click marketing are two of the most popular online marketing efforts for driving relevant traffic to your site. Many of my clients ask which one they should choose, which one will benefit them most and which would produce the most traffic. My answer is the same for every client – I recommend you choose both.
Understanding the Difference
Although both forms of marketing are found on the search engine there are some core differences that make each work independent of the other.
Here is the core differences:
What are the Benefits of SEO
- No cost per click.
- Generally once results are achieved the overall cost per lead is the most inexpensive form of marketing you can do.
- High level of trust amongst site visitors on organic results as high results usually infer competence.
What are the Benefits of PPC
- Immediate results.
- You only pay when a visitor clicks your ad.
- Target your ads to appear by region, city, state/province, country.
- Schedule your ads to appear during times only you want them up.
- Set a budget that you want to spend and we report to you the cost per lead.
- Choose short or long tail keywords.
- Choose which page to send your traffic to for improved relevance.
Why Do I Say You Should Choose Both?
The measurement services we offer allow myself to report to you the individual rate of return on each service. This means that I can tell you independently the value each campaign source is bringing to your company. I do this by measuring the leads you receive through each service and dividing this by the money spent. The result is a Cost Per Lead.
Here are the main reasons that I suggest doing both SEO and PPC
- Each service acts independently of the other and therefore offers a separate cost per lead. If each services cost per lead is acceptable to you then why wouldn’t you continue with them both?
- Having both services ensures better screen saturation. If you choose not to appear in PPC then your competitor will be in that place and get those clicks.
- PPC achieves immediate results, while SEO takes several months to ramp up. (but ultimately will offer a better cost per lead)
- It is proven that a company that has both Organic and Pay Per Click listings is deemed as more legitimate to people seeking to do business online.
- If you have immediate needs to be associated with specific keywords we can make the adjustment on Pay Per Click within 24 hours and begin working towards results in Organic which may take several months.
Start Researching Keywords
If you are interested in viewing keyword volume here is a great tool offered by Google:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This keyword tool will inform you how much traffic is associated with that keyword, the cost per click and the average position. The best feature of this tool is it gives you a list of various other related keywords and negative keywords you can use in our campaign.
We often use this to help measure keywords we want to address in Organic as well. Since you have a history of the keywords from your PPC this data can be used to optimize for your Organic rankings.
Where The Campaign Analyst Comes In
If you are working with an internet marketing company like ours you have someone responsible for reviewing results and reporting campaign improvements to you.
Remember – no company can rank you for every term in Organic. But with consistent review we can ensure we are on top of your campaign and can make ongoing tweaks so ensure maximum effectiveness.
If you use our WyseLabs service, we can even begin looking at how to improve your website by doing A/B testing. The service we use for this is Website Optimizer. This will allow us to make data driven decisions by letting visitors decide which site versions they like better.
Doing both SEO and PPC is a good thing! Being seen in the Organic and PPC section will allow maximum search engine saturation and real estate on the page. Once your campaigns are tweaked you should be seeing a nice return on investment for each individual service.
Totally agree with you. Have read all your old posts. Looking forward to some more tips. Love your writing style!
You mentioned screen saturation and I agree. I think of Google visitors as being two seperate groups. Those who click on a paid search result and those who choose from the organic results.
When you combine both PPC and SEO, you are theoretically doubling your chances of getting that click by appearing in BOTH sets of results. This is a huge benefit.
I too agree with you, both reap good returns.
But what will be the proportion, which one takes the bigger role?
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