According to Anne Holland over at MarketingSherpa.com, “This year marketers will spend roughly 1/8th of their search budgets on Search Engine Optimisation, and 7/8th on paid search ads.”
That, to my mind, is insane.
Search engine optimisation (that is, developing your site in such as way that it gets high search engine rankings) makes far more medium to long term sense than Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. The return on investment keeps going up and up as rankings rise.
With PPC the return on investment stops the minute the ads do.
Regards
Brendon
Cheers
It’s not so insane. Search marketing with PPC is much more stable and easier to understand than SEO. SEO, on the other hand, is akin to Vodoo magic, and you can pour thousands into it and have zero results.
Hi Peter,
In a sense I agree with you – advertisers can certainly understand the concept of “placing an ad”, whereas SEO techniques (and there are so many of them) are, as you say, seen as some kind of wierd voodoo.
As always though, balance is key. PPC Campaigns are more easily understood by your typical advertiser, but have less longterm gains. As Brendon says, as soon as you stop the campaign, you stop reaping the benefits.
With a properly executed SEO campaign, you already have organic traffic. (Which you are not paying for, at least not in a per-visitor sense.)
This organic traffic will generally maintain itself, although it will eventually slow down and fade out if the content isn’t kept fresh, etc.
So you have a choice:
a) Organic traffic – invest initial budget, and have a long-term traffic flow to your site.
b) PPC traffic, where every visitor costs you.
Personally, I prefer option C!
c) Market your site primarily through organic efforts to ensure sustainability, with PPC campaigns coming into play for specials, promotions, or just those really really competitive keyphrases.
With option C, you have the choice to stop spending money on your marketing for a while, and your site can still keep going during that time. You’ll need to continue eventually, but hey – long term, I figure its going to be the cheaper method!
Also, lets not forget the speculation that Google Adwords will rank your ad based on mostly-unknown factors, and some people say that your sites rank-position is one of these factors. So if you have no organic ranking, you could even be paying more for your clicks!
Cheers,
Anthony