You want your website to show up on page #1 of the search engines, but should you choose Pay per click (PPC) or organic SEO as your main strategy?
According to the e-book, SEO, PPC and Analytics by Search Marketing Now, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of generating traffic from free or organic search engine results. All major search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Paid search (PPC) advertising, on the other hand, are the search engine results that marketers pay for in an attempt to raise the ranking and visibility of their listings. Industry experts agree that SEO drives 75 percent of search traffic yet only 15 percent of budget; PPC gets 80 percent of budget yet generates only 25 percent of search traffic.”
PPC requires a monthly fee to the search engine—a fee per click—so you will need a substantial budget and a continual outflow of cash. David Blackburn, of Marketing Quotes, explains that, “Each click will cost you, and the clicks normally are not cheap. The cost of each click is determined by the popularity of the word/phrase. If it is very competitive (like car insurance) then each click could cost you up to $20. There is no money back, you pay for people to click (students, competitors, foreign companies) and there will be a high % of waste. Competitors that are researching will click on your links which cannot really be helped or blocked. Controlling who clicks on your adverts is down to chance.”
Our own firm’s SEO strategist, Mike Johnson, says that he “watched the cost-per-click (CPC) go from $0.74 for ‘Home Loans’ to $3.50 per click in one year. The following year, anything related to mortgages, home loans and the like were hovering around $18.00 per click for the top six listing positions (on the first page of Google).” He adds that, “there were over 6 million results for the term ‘adware and spyware’ when I worked with Symantec back in 2005. Today those same keywords produce over 35.7 million results. This is major reason why search marketing requires professionals who retain the experience to develop and manage both PPC and SEO campaigns.”
The vast majority of consumers are looking for organic results, not PPC ads. Eye studies show that only 10-20% of searchers even look at the PPC portions of search engine results, whereas 70% or more focus on organic results. In addition, there is a perception that the businesses the search engine pulls up are legitimate and trustworthy, while the PPC ads often don’t carry the same credibility. After all, ads are ads. Justin McGill explains in his blog entry, Why do SEO Professionals Dislike PPC? “Increasingly, users have become immune to obvious advertising, resulting in decreased effectiveness of PPC campaigns. This behavior can be attributed to higher levels of trust in the organic search results, natural aversion to the sales pitch, or expectations of better content on a page listed by Google as opposed to one listed by a paying advertiser.”
The goal of SEO is to get your website listed on page one of the search engines. It offers a higher ROI and better results over the long run than PPC, and you should see benefits for years to come. There is a cost associated with SEO and it may take longer than PPC to realize top search results, but once gained (where an ongoing campaign is managed properly) top listing results should continue to appear. Most, if not all, of your site’s pages will be easily found by search engines and consumers at a fraction of the cost of a PPC campaign over time. It’s difficult to maintain a PPC campaign over the long-term, and once you stop paying, you stop appearing. On the other hand, once SEO is in place, it will continue producing results for years to come, if properly managed.
Ideally, if you have the time and the budget, you can integrate both methods to put your website’s pages in front of the highest number of search consumers. It’s highly recommended that you hire a Search Marketing Professional for best results, since both PPC and SEO require specialized strategy and technical know how to get you and keep you on page one. PPC can be useful for short-term campaigns, but in the long run, organic SEO provides more bang for the buck.
