SEO Blog

Haha – I might write to Harry Hill & ask him to have an SEO vs PPC  fight on the “TV burp” show

Joking apart, this post is been made in reply to : http://contactdubai.com/internet-marketing/seo-or-ppc-which-one-should-you-use by one of my twitter friends leif_n

I have seen this post as a good chance for a friendly debate on the argument between SEO & PPC.

Main Plus points for PPC :

• Almost instant traffic.
• Little effort – A campaign can be started very quickly, without putting in a great deal of time or effort.
• Great stats – allowing you to test & tweak effectively to increase click through rates.
• If conversion tracking is used, you can work out which keywords are converting keywords, and which ones are not. Major plus!

Main minus points for PPC:

• Yes traffic is almost instant – but paying is just as instant, and to begin with on a new campaign you have no way of knowing what the conversion of a keyword is going to be – which means you may have to pour money into non-converting keywords first.
• If you do actually start a PPC campaign very quickly, without putting in real effort to determine which keywords to focus on, how much to bid – and quite a number of other factors (see perry marshall if you want to know how to figure all this out) – it’s quite possible you’ll have a campaign set up very quickly – that will pour your cash down the plug hole very quickly, with little benefit. If you’ve not got your keywords right, if you’ve not done your figures correctly in terms of your conversion rate, cost per click, profit per sale – visitor value – then you may just completely blow your advertising budget, in a very short space of time.
• No residual benefit, when you stop paying, the traffic stops completely

Main Plus points for SEO:

• Residual Benefit. Although the perception to many of SEO, is that it’s time consuming – it’s really no more time consuming than setting up a PPC campaign PROPERLY, and the results are residual. SEO done correctly will provide residual search engine traffic, while PPC done correctly will only provide results while you’re still paying for them.
• FREE. Unless you hire an SEO consultant optimizing your site will cost you nothing but time & effort. Many people  opt for PPC because it looks like PPC requires no time & effort, actually PPC requires quite a bit of time & effort to do properly, and trying to do it with very little initial or ongoing time & effort applied is very likely to end up with wasted cash.
• More Traffic.  Although there’s a lot of traffic available via PPC – more people click on organic listings than on sponsored listings.

Main Minus points for SEO:

There are none!

You can call me biased, but I honestly can see no minus points.

Here are the minus points that most people would throw up for SEO, and my answers to these arguments :

• SEO takes too long
• SEO is too complex
• Organic Search engine positions change too often
• SEO changes & positions can be lost over night

SEO takes too long

SEO only takes a long time if you’re focusing on keywords that are currently beyond your reach – and this comes down to good keyword research.

When you research your keywords, you need to go beyond the traffic, and research the competition also – and then ask yourself “can my site compete?”.  For instance, if page one of google results for the given keyword is full of very established sites with lots of link popularity & domain age, and you have a brand new site with few backlinks, then it’s not practical to expect to rank on page one for this particular keyword within a short space of time.

When it comes to off page factors, your site is going to have to come up to the level of those sites currently in the position that you’re wanting to achieve, so you need to work out how quickly it’s possible to do this.

So yes – if you focus on highly competitive keywords, then it may take you a long time to rank for these keywords, but the answer isn’t “ahh sod it – lets go PPC instead” because if so, then how much per click are you potentially looking at to get decent traffic for that keyword? If it’s a competitive keyword, then the chances are cost per click isn’t going to be cheap. Instead, the answer is – focus on keywords with SEO that you CAN rank highly for quickly, by researching to find decent keywords that aren’t as competitive.

Then in time as your link popularity increases, you’ll find it easier to gain higher ranking for more competitive key words.

So in reply to leif_n‘s comments about taking a year to achieve high ranking – if this is the case it means you’re focusing on keywords that are a year ahead of your site in terms of off page, so just focus on keywords that you can rank for instantly instead.

Yes – less competitive keywords usually mean less traffic, but they’re often much more targeted keywords, which means they’re usually higher conversion.

I often get sites top ranking & traffic within days, I don’t do this by going after very competitive keywords, I do it by identifying the real gems of keywords that most if the competition are missing. I did this recently with a brand new site that provided over £1 Million worth of enquiries over a period of around 90 days.

SEO is too complex

So hire an SEO consultant like me then! Still cheaper than PPC haha

Joking apart – it’s really not that complex at all, in fact enter your name & email in the form on the right hand side of the page, and I’ll tell tell you in my SEO tips email series, just how to do it.

Organic Search engine positions change too often

I have sites still with the same, or higher positions, after years of having initially done the SEO.

Yes if you just completely abandon your site & do nothing else with it then over time positions are likely to deteriorate – but if you continue to update & increase your website over time, you should find that your positions increase, not decrease.

It also depends on the keywords in question, very valuable & highly competitive keywords are likely to require more effort to maintain depending on the efforts of your competitors to climb up the rankings.

But – if it’s very highly competitive keywords you’re referring to, then even if you do have to fight to maintain them, it’s likely to be a lot less costly to do this with SEO than with PPC, even if you’re using a professional search engine optimization consultant – because very competitive keywords are going to cost you a lot via PPC.

SEO changes & positions can be lost over night

A lot of people worry about this one, because of hearing horror stories about people having all page one rankings, and then waking up to find their rankings have dropped to obscurity.

The truth is though, this will only happen if you’re using risky tactics that the search engines don’t like.

For example, up to the second half of 2007, many people were utilizing paid backlinks as a major part of their SEO, despite people like me bleating on about this being against Google terms, and that they were bound to pull the rug on this at some point. Then one day, all of a sudden, thousands of people find their rankings have dropped, followed shortly after by a drop in toolbar pagerank when Google updated it.

Yes, as with anything algorithmic, results  can change when the algorithm is changed, and as Google play with their algorithm things can change slightly – but for the most part, as long as you’re not doing anything that Google may not like, then your positions are usually going to be OK – they may fluctuate slightly, this will happen with PPC too – but they won’t normally just drop into the abyss unless it’s for a very good reason.

I am NOT saying you shouldn’t also use PPC – in fact I DO, Definitely think that you should also incorporate PPC into your website marketing.

Hey? Haven’t I just been slagging off PPC?

No – it may have seemed that way, but I’m not at all. Pay Per Click is MEGA - especially google Adwords, however it’s not right for many people at the beginning of a project, due to the fact that it can take an investment at a level that many people cannot afford initially, and many people think that PPC is really easy & fast to set up, but in fact it’s usually only easy & fast if it’s not being done properly – which can lead many people to lose money quickly, rather than to make money. (See Perry Marshalls Free 5 day adwords course to learn how to do ppc properly)

I do agree with leif_n however, that PPC and SEO should be used in unison, but I do disagree silghtly in terms of how this should happen.

leif_n is basically saying that SEO & PPC should be started out together, and then PPC should be fazed out once SEO has gained organic positions which will bring in the traffic for these keywords.

Personally, I would go about it slightly differently.

First of all, I would only recommend investing in a PPC campaign if you either have the budget to test – OR if you already know for sure which keywords within that niche are converting.

If it’s a new project and you have idea’s in terms of which keywords will work but you don’t really know, then you’re going to have to use your budget to test to find out which keywords convert – and you can only do this if you can use conversion tracking to work out your exact conversion.

Google adwords gave me a call the other day, trying to get me onto one of their quickstart adwords programs – the guy who phoned me really impressed me with his honesty.

First of all he advised me that to go on their program (which means that they help you to set up your campaign) requires a minimum monthly investment of £4000.

When I replied that we would first surely need  to test to find out which keywords converted? He replied “yes, this is what the first months budget would be used for, to test to find the keywords which convert & those that don’t”

As I say, I was impressed with the guys honesty, as I knew this was the case but I wasn’t expecting the sales guy to come out & admit it so readily.

So, £4,000 per month minimum investment – and the first months £4k + is mainly testing. Wow

I’m not saying this is what your minimum would be, but this is the minimum Google will accept on the prgram they offer, and depending on the niche & the keywords you’re looking at, I don’t think this is un-realistic.

On the flip side of this, if you do invest this kind of money, and you use it initially to find out which keywords convert – it’s well worth the investment! You can then ditch all of the non-converting keywords & focus on the terms that bring in the conversion.

The problem is though, most people want to start really small with adwords, and most of the time it’s just not practical to do that.

So, if you have a budget – then a great way to start would be to use this budget initially, with conversion tracking, to find out which keywords are the ones to go for, and which ones aren’t worth bothering with.

Should you then phase out PPC once SEO is kicking in?

No way – Increase it, don’t phase it out!

If you’ve found out which keywords are effective, and you’re focusing only on these, and you’re tracking your conversion – then you know that you’re making a profit on your PPC investment, so money in = more money out, if you know that $100 in will give you $300 out, then surely you’re going to continually increase your PPC investment?

You see, I treat organic results and sponsored results as two different markets – 2 different kinds of media, they may both be on the same page – but they are effectively two different channels. People are going to click organic results – people are going to click sponsored results, so as long as you’ve done your research properly on the sponsored, and you’re sure that you’re focusing on terms that convert, then surely you want to continually focus on both organic and sponsored?

So – if you have the budget, then I would recommend using PPC first to work out which are the keywords which convert – and then focus on these keywords also on your SEO.

If you don’t have the budget to do this however, and you don’t really know which keywords do convert & which keywords don’t, then I would recommend starting with SEO, ignoring PPC until you’re bringing in money, then when you have a budget to invest you can use this to learn a lot more about the ROI on the keywords you’re focusing on – and decide on which ones to then continue to focus on, both with SEO & PPC.

So – in conclusion, who would win in a fight between SEO & PPC – neither of them. Instead they’d realise after the first couple of punches, that they actually have a lot in common, and should be best of friends – and they’d end up having a beer together instead, and laughing about that petty fight they nearly had!

Some Google Adwords Resources :

Perry Marshalls Free 5 day Adwords Course

My friend PPC Consultant Lee Jackson