Aug
16
This is a question that we are asked often: “Should we invest in PPC or in SEO”?
My answer is typically that you should always be investing in PPC no matter what stage you are at (Startup or Fortune 5000) and that SEO depends on where you are in the life cycle of your business.
I recommend that smaller companies without a proven revenue model stay away from investing in SEO until you have a clearly identified business model. On the other hand, I almost always recommend SEO (in addition to PPC) for more mature companies. The reason is two fold.
Reason #1: Mature Companies Know What a Client is Worth
You should never invest a ton of time or money into something until you have a clear idea of what your return will be. Startups often have to change their offering several times to adapt to customers true wants. A startup investing into SEO without seeing what the average value per customer is going to be is doing just that. A mature company on the other hand should have their product/service clearly identified and know within a decent margin of error how much an average customer is worth to them on a gross and net basis.
Reason #2: SEO is not Immediate. PPC Is.
Investing in SEO should be part of a larger plan to attain more customers at a lower cost than PPC. For companies that are still proving their business model, ppc is a great way to attain leads at a reasonable rate and evaluate your conversion rate. After 100 or so leads, you should start to formulate a good idea of your conversion rate and the average value of the customers. This gives you a rough idea of your ROI for PPC. My recommendation for more mature companies is to decide how much you are willing to spend to attain a new customer and after running some professionally managed campaigns, evaluating if web leads convert well for your company. In most cases, they do. In this case, we recommend investing in SEO to cast a bigger net, attain more leads, and most importantly, get the leads before the competitors do.
The good news is that MOST industries still have relatively low competition rates. If you are in a niche arena and if you focus on certain geographic regions, SEO can help you attain a much larger number of leads. However, it will take time. Do not expect overnight first page rankings. A first page ranking on Google happens when Google determines that your content is both credible and more relevant than the content of those you now rank above.
Benefits of PPC:
- Quick Feedback – With a few hundred $$, you should know whether or not your current offering will convert.
- Help you determine which terms convert and which ones don’t. This will help you determine which terms you should invest into getting optimized for the search engines.
- You can geo-target your ppc ads to show specific pages to different cities. So, for example, if you have an office in Houston and in Atlanta, you can show geographically specific landing pages to each area.
- Captures the portion of web surfers who only click on ppc ads.
- Very scalable for smaller companies. You can start with a low investment and scale it up to as much as you can afford. It can be a terrific growth medium and one of the most effective and efficient forms of advertising.
Benefits of SEO:
- Helps you attain customers at a lower cost than ppc.
- Free, high volume traffic from the search engines.
- Enhanced credibility.
- Helps you capture the searchers who click only on search engine results (not ppc advertisements).
A variety of factors go into evaluating PPC and SEO as a marketing tool for your business. If you would like to learn more about how they can benefit your business, please contact us at 1-866-960-2318.
Eric is a search engine optimization specialist who leads the SEO department at Immix. Immix is an award winning web design and search engine optimization company. Immix has been serving companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies on a national level for nearly 10 years. You can contact us for a free consultation at 1-866-960-2318.
