In terms of internet marketing that will produce the greatest benefits in the long term, should you focus your efforts on good SEO or spend your budget on a PPC advertising campaign? The truth is that you probably need both.
When considering PPC versus SEO, each marketing technique produces different results and comes with its own benefits and disadvantages. Consider for yourself how to achieve the best balance.
PPC – Pay Per Click
A PPC campaign with one, two, or all of the major search engines is one of the most effective forms of advertising you can pay for.
When it comes to an online business, traditional print adverts and phone page listings are not the most effective. When you target internet users, you have to reach them where and when they can be induced to take at a look at your website.
Of course, PPC ads reach the largest number of potential customers. Google is the clear winner in the search engine wars and placing a banner on their results pages is the number one way to get the greatest reach from your internet marketing efforts. And because the campaign can be targeted specifically at geographic locations, demographics, and keyword combinations, the traffic received from click-throughs is very qualified.
The biggest disadvantage is the cost. You are probably aware of the old adage that it takes money to make money, but most fledgling enterprises don’t have the marketing funds a well-established company does to bid on popular keyword combinations.
The best way to make a PPC campaign work for your new business is to start small and make a commitment to reinvest profits as soon as they are made. Forget about buying a new toy and focus instead on online advertising that will help your company grow quickly.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
Perhaps the best thing about investing time in search engine optimisation is that the effects have the potential to be long-lasting. The benefits will not be immediately recognised because search engine crawlers are on their own schedule; you can’t hurry them up. In fact, immediately after your website goes live, it often has to spend time in Google’s sandbox before it is indexed. But what you do today could well become the driving force behind your success in the next month. Time can equal money with SEO.
Good SEO does more than attract search engines; it should make your e-commerce site easier to navigate and provide a better experience overall for human visitors. And unlike PPC, SEO costs not much more than effort and time. Once certain factors are set up, such as the permalink structure of blog posts, automatic pinging, or meta tags added to a page header, there is little, if any, need to change it again.
The only real disadvantage to relying on SEO to bring traffic and sales to your website is the time factor. Don’t get discouraged. Keep doing those things that are best for optimising your pages and you will eventually see the payoff. Any new venture requires time before it is successful and this is very true when it comes to SEO.
There really is no battle between the benefit of PPC versus SEO; both are vital to the success of your online business. Each will bring great benefit in its own time frame. PPC can help you get fast results, at a price and SEO can bring you repeated results, with time and sweat equity.
About Sean Rasmussen
I have been so focused on SEO I lost sight of PPC. In terms of “vital” I didn’t realize that PPC was “vital”. Most of what I have read about PPC include warnings that you need to really know what you are doing or it can be an expensive learning exercise so my focus has been to become totally comfortable with the PPC and investing the necessary time and sweat to develop good product prior to investing the time to thoroughly learn PPC to the degree that I am comfortable investing the (bigger) $.
If you have your own product, you may very well find that PPC marketing becomes a vital part of your online promotion. In saying that, SEO can work very well depending on how much competition you have in your niche (and the amount of time it takes you to achieve high rankings). If you can make it to #1 organically, there may not be as much of a need for PPC, however in the interim it can bring you some great exposure resulting in sales.
PPC is an area I have only dabbled in.
Sean I’m curious, is there any benefit in using PPC in one search engine over another, say Yahoo instead of Google.
Apart from the obvious, where more internet users use google than yahoo, is there any cost per keyword benefits or any other benefit, in using alternative search engine PPC.
Hi Cade – I can’t answer your question about comparing the different PPC options between search engines, but I just wanted to add that there’s also the social media PPCs. In particular, I’m thinking of facebook which is getting some buzz about.
The only real disadvantage to SEO is the time factor? What about the fact that Google keeps changing its rules and algorithms!? I think the real disadvantage is the unpredictability of it. You could be on page 1 google, but how long will you stay there, despite your best efforts? Organic SEO is awesome, but I would rather a balance in traffic generation strategies for this reason.
You will find Yahoo and other sources are less expensive compared to Google. I have not tested the others enough to comment sorry Cade. The main benefit of trying others would be to cut costs I suppose.
Both Google and Yahoo have massive markets. You also need to look at whether you are spending your money on Sponsored Search or Content.
The best advise I could offer is if you have a limited budget, use the larger search engines with highly targeted ads (and keywords). Otherwise you could see your PPC budget dwindle very quickly with nothing to show for it.
I guess once you have your own product PPC definitely is something to take into account. But at the moment I am not there and I am not sure if PPC is the right thing for me at the moment, only starting off with Affiliate products.
Hi Renee,
I know I am not going to do PPC again for a long time yet I tried once it because someone told me I had to do it so my site would rate, I was on top(but only as a paid listing) till the money ran out after that I still didn’t rate so now I will wait till my pages are rating then if necessary I will run a campaign to increase the visitors.
Rita
Hi Sean,
I think a balance between the two is the best way to go. I have started with SEO because it was free and I think it’s a valuable skill to have, to be able to rank pages number one in Google.
But, I also think PPC is important. I think if I can master running PPC campaigns, it will be very financially rewarding. I think you can get quicker results with PPC but it can also cost you dearly.