Green Light For Go – SEO. Amber light for PPC.

What is Kev going on about now??

I’m simply sharing my opinion that search engine optimisation (SEO) is safe, but pay per click marketing can be a real money pit.

I’m not suggesting that you can’t lose money with SEO – in fact, there are plenty of firms out there operating a services which have been branded a scam by previous unhappy clients – but what I’m saying is if SEO is done properly, either by yourself, or by a decent & honest SEO consultant or firm, it’s very unlikely to be money down the toilet. The benefits of SEO can last for a long time, if done correctly – PPC on the other hand ,the minute you stop sponsoring keywords – the traffic stops, so it’s a gamble, if it doesn’t pay off, then you have to cut your losses.

The only time I would actually recommend risking losing money on PPC, would be at the beginning of an SEO campaign. If PPC is set up correctly, you can actually get some very valuable keyword data, conversion data in particular. So it’s often not a bad strategy to start off a PPC campaign with a fixed amount of money to play with – with the understanding that this money is being invested in finding out which keywords are the ones that convert – and any money made back on the adwords campaign is just a bonus.

With many markets / niches,  I have no idea how people manage to run successful PPC campaigns, when you work out the cost per click, and the average profit per sale the business is likely to be making, the conversion rates that would be needed to make it pay are often impossible, or at least highly improbable.

If you’re using PPC to gain subscribers, and build up an email list – then you may be able to take the view that you’re investing as long as the list is building – as long as you’re confident that you can successfully then sell to your list over time. But other than this, in most cases I struggle to see how people make PPC pay, and I suspect that in most cases, it’s  not paying, and the advertiser just hasn’t figured out yet that they’re making a loss.

With SEO – as long as you’re focusing on search terms which you can rank highly for in the not to distant future, and you’re not solely targeting very competitive search terms, then it’s likely that you’ll keep benefiting from your SEO for a long time.

This isn’t to say that you can do SEO for a month, and then stop & that’s all that will be required – in fact the chances are if you carry out SEO activities for a month & then stop, it’s unlikely you’ll achieve much. Google expect to see continued efforts over a period of time, an increase in content, an increase in backlinks, in an ongoing manner.

The trick is though, to conduct SEO efforts which are cumulative – for instance, article writing & submissions will keep working for you for some time once you submit them (as long as you’re submitting to the right article networks & directories), creating link bait in the form of well written, interesting & useful web content, is likely to make people within your niche want to link to you – and in general, SEO success breeds more success, as your site gets more of a buzz due to your SEO efforts,  the snowball gets bigger & takes less effort to get it rolling down the hill.

Of course – you could just hire an SEO consultant to do it for you

Tagged with: amber light ppc • green light for search • green light for SEO • green light seo

Filed under: SEO Help & Tips

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!