There is an interesting post over at Ali Sale’s blog at Compendium Blogware.The title of the post is Pay Per Click vs SEO – Which Gets More?. It was an interesting title for me to click through because I have been debating the concept myself. Which one is worth more? Interesting fact for Ali’s blog.:
“Even though organic search is nearly 10x more effective on the click side, marketers are still pouring 10x the amount of cash into PPC (pay per click).”
This doesn’t make any sense to me other than one thing: time. I am not a huge student of PPC or Organic Search optimization but it makes complete sense to me (as a business owner) to use something that is 10x more effective than another tool.
Do I need to draw a picture?
It would be like paying someone for an 8-track to play on an iPod.
It would be like trying to run Office 2008 on Windows Me… When in reality you should not be running or using a PC. 🙂
Okay.. maybe those did not make any sense but you get the point.
Does it make business sense to pay for something that is about to dissapear? You are creating content, creating an experience, and getting better search results with organic search engine optimization. Why would you pay someone to for click throughs?
I am curious. Honestly curious. Why would you pick PPC over Organic SEO. Is it the time?
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chris
PPC and SEO can work very well together. Should you ditch any SEO effort for pure PPC? No! But with SEO you can target 7-12-15 keywords? With PPC you can target 50-100-1,000. It is an extension of your marketing mix. Content will always be king and you should have sound SEO strategies in place, but summarily dismissing PPC is a flawed strategy
Brandon
The Organic SEO and PPC post from ielectrify hits the nail on the head.
(http://ielectrify.com/gettingstarted/organic-seo-ppc/)
In my opinion the main difference is between SEO and PPC is time and the purpose of the traffic.
While SEO is good for driving free relevant traffic, it’s horrible at doing it quickly and requires you to take weeks to get a specific campaign page indexed and ranked.
While PPC is great for driving targeted traffic to a specific campaign for an exact moment in time. However, it is not cost effective for generating continual traffic.
Both are tools to achieve the same general objective – driving targeted individuals and hopefully getting them to follow through on the call to action.
I do see the long term view of PPC changing completely as it has every time the market collapses – where it will go, I am not sure.
Lorraine Ball
While I don’t often recommend PPC, particularly for B2B applications, it can be effective for broad based consumer promotions.
chris
@Lorraine we actually see very good PPC traffic for our (mostly) B2B application. If you run a narrow campaign, track and measure you can direct some very qualified traffic using PPC campaigns and see good results.
Deeter
PPC works well as the “front end” of a good SEO or SEM campaign. Often times a client will have no idea which key phrases a genuine lead/prospect/customer uses to find them. Or, which social media venues these folks are more likely to reside in.
In 2-3 weeks, a well structured PPC campaign can determine these key phrases, and, if you go an extra step and split test a few pages, the copy that converts.
With that info, the initial SEO and SEM work can be targeted much more tightly.
Jim Brown
Why spend money on PPC? That is a pretty ridiculous question. Why spend money on ANY marketing? The answer is to ACQUIRE business. In a PPC campaign, if targeted, and tracked properly, you can determine a CPA – Cost Per Acquisition. If you are comfortable with that number – why would you QUIT?
Regardless of WHAT marketing effort you choose – you WILL have COST. I know for a fact that if you calculate the total CPA for SEO (to include blogging, social media, etc) your COST will be higher than PPC.
The majority of our clients (95%) are B2B and are realizing substantial gains in PPC.
Kyle Lacy
@Jim I never said don’t spend money but I feel like you get the same targeted search with organic as you do PPC.
Could you state that fact? Do you have anything to back up that claim in the middle?
🙂 You know I love you.
Jim Brown
Ummm… what is the title of your blog entry? “Why Spend Money on PPC? QUIT WASTING MONEY!” <– Seems to me you said “Don’t spend money!” 🙂
You will NOT get the same targeted traffic with organic as you will with PPC. With organic your get more clicks/traffic… but I could care less about that. I’m NOT out to improve my Alexa ranking, I want ACTION. ACTION = CONVERSIONS = $$$
Kyle Lacy
What makes you say organic search is NOT targeted? You can use tools like WordPress and Compendium to get targeted traffic.
The beauty with organic is that you are actually creating content while improving your search ranking. two for one.
Monty’s Mega Marketing
PPC is great for the ‘quick fix’. Why wait days for the search engines to give you good rank when you can pay for traffic?
That being said, I am a huge SEO fan myself.
Duncan
Of course a guy that works for a company that is based on content that helps with SEO is going to be against paid search. When you’re looking for results – you have to use a variety of strategies. They’ve both got their reasons. I just attended SES Chicago and there’s lot of compelling reasons and great tracking for both paid and organic search.
Matt Zentz
Kyle, I agree with Duncan to an extent. You should try a variety of methods but you should only use those that show results based on careful measurement and research. Test first, then implement.
What if I want to buy a projector? Blogs and other social media are great places to research different brands and models. Yet, when I’m ready to buy, I want to see direct links to make a purchase. Often, though, search results only return reviews and other chatter which is when I click on the PPC link.