SEO vs PPC
I’ve been asked quite a few times about the SEO vs PPC. First of all, to the uninitiated, I’ll explain the difference. If you already know the difference between SEO & PPC then you can skip this bit.
Organic Google Search Results
The organic search results are the results on the left under the block of three paid results which you’ll usually see first (unless their are no ads for the search term, which is unusual):

Organic results are the free results, and results are shown in accordance with Google’s search results algorithm which is designed to allow the best, most valuable & most relevant content for any given search term, to rise to the top.
Paid Google Search Results, AKA Google Adwords, Pay Per Click, PPC
The paid results, PPC (Pay Per Click), are the results you see at the top of each page, and on the right hand side:

You get your website into the paid search results with Google Adwords, and the results are ordered by the adwords algorithm which takes a number of things into account including bid amount, click through rates & quality score (which aims to rank the quality and relevance of the landing page).
So there you go, if you weren’t sure of the difference, hopefully this simple explanation has helped.
SEO vs PPC
So which should you focus on, which is best, SEO or PPC, which would win in a fight??
I’m kind of biased because although I do have quite a bit of experience with PPC, organic SEO is my forte’ & my passion – so I’m inclined to say that SEO is best, but the truth is that it’s a case of “horses for courses”, i.e. it just depends.
The first thing I will say about PPC, is that many, many businesses are pouring good money down the drain with it! PPC is a fantastic tool if used right, if used wrong it’s a quick way to lose all your money & see zero return, and from my experience, most businesses use it wrong. But I’ll get to that shortly.
In terms of which is best, it really depends on your business, and your website.
I’ll back up a little bit first and talk about website function. All business websites should be thought of (in my opinion) not as “websites” but as business tools. All business websites are tools, but they need to do different things for different businesses. If you’re selling online, then your website is an online selling tool – if you’re not selling online but you’re generating enquiries online, then your website is an enquiry generation tool. If you’re booking appointments for your sales team with your website, then your website is an appintment booking tool, if you’re building an email marketing list with your website, then it’s a list building tool (and you then use broadcasts to your list to convert to sales / signups / sales / enquiries) , if you’re doing a number of different things with your site, then your website is a Swiss army knife
One of the mistakes that many (most) businesses make (and not only small businesses) is that they do not properly identify what kind of a tool their website needs to be, and then when it comes to marketing they apply the wrong kinds of marketing strategies, and the website marketing is doomed from the outset.
So what kind of a tool does your website need to be?
If you’re a traditional offline business, and you do not sell products or services online, then your website is either going to be an enquiry generation tool or an list building tool. If you sell products or services online, then your website is a direct sales tool.
It’s all about being able to track conversion. The better you’re able to track the conversion & the return on investment, the more practical it becomes to be able to safely invest in PPC marketing. You can track conversion very easily with direct sales websites, Ecommerce websites – but it’s not so easy to track conversion & returns with enquiry generation & list building websites, so it’s harder to ensure that you’re making a profit from PPC with these kinds of websites.
Direct sales tools work great with PPC – they work well with organic SEO too – but the great thing about PPC is that you can generate sales straight away (if you do it right.) The reason direct sales tools are great to use with PPC, is that as you’re paying for the traffic you need to be able to measure the return, and with direct online sales you can measure the return very effectively, as long as you have conversion tracking set up (which is a must), then you can see straight away what return you’re making from SEO, and if you’re not making a profit you can tweak accordingly, and test & measure until you’re seeing great results. SEO is great for direct selling websites also, and you can set up conversion tracking with Google anayltics so you can see which search terms are bringing a return via organic search. But organic search can take some time, so if you have some budget for PPC, I’d advise that you start with PPC to get some traffic going, and then use the data you generate from PPC (i.e which search terms are bringing the best returns) to then begin your organic SEO campaign to generate organic traffic for the search terms which are bringing the most profit.
Enquiry generation & list building websites can be tricky when it comes to PPC, for the reason that the website isn’t directly converting the sale, so you can’t work out a direct return. It could be that you think PPC is generating sales, but actually your sales are coming from other marketing avenues & you would do better cutting the PPC & investing into the other area which is actually bringing the sales (i.e. SEO or offline marketing methods).
Lets say that you have an average profit per sale (of a product or service) of $100, for example. If you’re selling online, it’s very easy to see that if you have an average sales conversion rate of 1%, and you’re paying $0.50 per click, you’re paying $50 to make $100. So with online sales you can carefully track conversions, and drop any terms which are costing too much or which aren’t converting. Even if you’re not making any return, at leas you know this & you can act accordingly.
But when you’re not selling online, it’s harder to work out your exact conversion rate, as the sale is converted via a process which can’t be tracked online. Well actually, it can be, there are some tools available now which can convert from ppc traffic through to telephone enquiries, but they’re not particularly cheap & they’re fairly complex to set up & run properly.
I’ve had direct experience of this – years ago I had an offline business, with a website which did have some online selling but it was mainly an enquiry generation website, I was pumping money into adwords just assuming that this was where a chunk of the sales were coming form as it seemed to increase as I put more cash into PPC, but one day I decided to pause the PPC campaign, and I discovered that it made no difference at all to sales, and that in fact the sales were coming in mainly via organic SEO and some offline marketing I’d done – figuring this out saved me about a thousand dollars per month, and if I’d known this 18 months earlier….
Don’t get me wrong – PPC can be fantastic, and there are people making a LOT of profit from it – but equally there are some businesses wasting money on PPC, either just because they’re not using conversion tracking, or because their website is an enquiry generation tool so they cannot figure out whether they’re making a profit from PPC marketing.
When PPC started out, you could get onto page one with google adwords for pennies per click, now however it’s got so popular that many search terms have expensive minimum page one bid amounts, many of which are higher than $0.50 per click, some which are $1 per click or considerably more. Average online sales conversion is usually somewhere between 0.25% – 1%, which means you need between 100 and 400 clicks in order to make a sale, so lets work this out:
If you’re paying an average of $0.50 per click, the cost of sale is between $50 – $200. So if your average profit per sale is $20 – OOPS!! If you’re paying an average of $1.50 per click, the cost of sale with an average conversion rate is $150 – $600.
This may seem steep, but this is the issue many have when it comes to PPC, they don’t have high enough conversion rates, and/or high enough average profit per sale.
If you’re making a couple of grand per sale, then you’re probably safe as your profit level will cover the cost of sale even if you’re paying a fairly high PPC & your conversion rate isn’t amazing, but if you’re only making tens of dollars per sale, then you can see that it’s not going to be very easy to make money via PPC.
So, PPC is good for direct sales sites, and particularly good for high profit sales, but you need to be able to track conversion & profit.
SEO on the other hand is good for enquiry sites, and list generation, because you’re not paying per click – so if you get to page one for a search term which is performing, then you have a traffic generation system which will feed your enquiry generation or list building website, without having to continually pay for the traffic.
There you go, hopefully this has given you a better understanding of SEO vs PPC