SEO vs. PPC – Or Both?

“Should I do Pay-Per-Click or SEO?”  I get asked this question a lot and my answer is always the same.  Both.  By doing both of these forms of search marketing, you are allowing yourself to own the search results for your keywords.  Search engine saturation occurs when your pages are showing up within the paid, organic and image results.  There could potentially be some negatives to this, but let’s explore the whole picture.

The case for SEO.  Other than the costs of paying either an in-house search engine specialist or outsourcing it to an SEO consultant, it is free.  You are not paying every time somebody clicks, purchases, or bidding on a position.  Studies have shown that people are becoming smarter searchers and do not click on paid ads as much as as an organic listing.  They feel that the organic listings are more trustworthy as opposed to somebody who can just pay a higher amount to be listed in the paid ads.  Creating great content, which is a large portion of your SEO work, will also create something more for your visitors or customer based, as opposed to just having a great ad copy in a paid listing.  This does not make PPC campaigns bad either.

There are certain terms that are either so generic or have such a high powered brand attempting to rank for them that no matter how much SEO you put in, you may not be able to get to the top of the search results.  That is fine.  You may not want some of that organic traffic anyway, especially if it is highly untargetted.  One way to get your ad copy to be shown and to be clicked on by a targeted visitor is to utilize pay-per-click campaigns.  If you want to completely own the search results page and gain search engine saturation for a specific keyword or phrase, then you may decide to bid on keywords that you currently own the top few spots in the organic listings for.  This is a way to totally drive out your competition.  They do not show up in the paid search and they don’t show up in the organic search.

As you can see, there should not be a one or the other decision to be made.  They both can be helpful.  If you know that you cannot afford both, then it may be best to start with some SEO foundational work to make sure that your website is search engine friendly from the very beginning, so that if you decide to do SEO in the future, you do not have to go backwards.  If you are not looking for long term results, then a PPC campaign may be best for you.