Nowadays many advertisers are uncertain whether to invest more on PPC (Pay Per Click) or SEO (Search Engine Optimization) when preparing their Digital and Internet Marketing budgets. This has been a long standing debate amongst experts but the industry has matured and there are some clear answers now.
Many people created this myth about Search Engine Marketing which goes as follows: SEO is cheaper than paying every time someone clicks on my Google ad so let’s spend all our time and money on SEO strategies.
This is a big mistake. SEO on its own will not perform miracles for your business or website. The proper course of action is to use a balanced mix of both Paid Search (PPC) and SEO and every website requires its own analysis in order to calculate that mix.
So why doesn’t it make sense to perform just SEO on your website?
Firstly, a proper SEO strategy revolves around “content”. if you have a small website it is very difficult to implement SEO for many keywords. It will be necessary to create many individual landing pages and you will need to perform specific SEO strategies to each one, or you will not manage to improve your organic rankings or increase your traffic. It makes the most sense to select two or three specific keywords to focus on in your SEO strategy and balance things out by working on the other important keywords through PPC on Google or Bing sponsored links with a low cost per click.
Secondly, it is important to understand that many websites are now implementing SEO strategies for their websites, but Page 1 of Google has space for a maximum of only ten organic results. Further, the Google algorithms are changing constantly. Unless you have a crystal ball you will continuously need to spend more time and money updating and ”fixing” your optimized landing pages. Accordingly for keywords where there are more SEO competitors and where your website is thin on content it is wise to use PPC and sponsored links as well.
Thirdly, any sound SEO strategy takes time and requires patience in order to see substantial results. In order to get instant traffic and also valuable data on the effectiveness of keywords it makes a lot of sense to implement a PPC campaign while your SEO results are arriving.
Above I have listed only three points in order to explain why it is difficult to help your client or yourself choose between an SEO campaign or an AdWords or PPC campaign. My suggestion is to use both. The most effective Search Engine strategy requires a calculated mix of both PPC and SEO in order to ensure coverage on the SERP and to improve opportunities for increased clicks, traffic and conversion rates.
iRISEmedia is an online advertising agency specializing in Internet marketing and SEO and PPC services We are located in Toronto, Ontario and service clients throughout Canada and globally.
