Organic SEO vs PPC (Paid advertising) - Which packs a punch
I’ll try my best, to make this topic as fair, logical and educative. Nope, this isn’t going to be another Mom&Pop article debate about SEO vs paid advertising. I’ve read too many articles portraying SEM (Pay-per-click) advertising as a wasted marketing effort. Many marketers condemn SEM while praising SEO efforts. Well, with web analytics around and a more than decent knowledge of managing PPC campaigns, we can hopefully spot a transition towards the notation of “an underdog going over”. Read on, because despite all this, there is still a strongly substantiated view that SEM is no fight for SEO. I personally know a lot of Search Marketing Companies trying to sell their clients PPC advertising tell their clients that PPC is ‘the only way to go’.
When a business makes the choice to advertise online, there several different paths that a company can choose. One is to grow website traffic and customer conversion rates with organic search engine optimization . Another option is pay-per-click advertising . Ideally, the best marketing solution is to find a happy medium that utilizes both types of advertising. However, a company’s budget for advertising or marketing usually dictates which option provides the most bang for the buck. If you are struggling with this decision for your business – organic search engine optimization versus pay-per-click advertising – here are some helpful tips to send you down the right path.
Organic Growth Advantages
1. Organic vs. Paid Advertising: Organic growth has demonstrated to be more beneficial than pay-per-click marketing for several reasons. Studies have been conducted that show that when individuals are conducting online searches, they are 50 to 70 percent more likely to click on the results that show in the organic listings as opposed to results that show as paid advertisements. To take it a step further, these studies showed that individuals are six times more likely to choose and click on one of the first few organic results than they are to click on the paid advertising links.
2. Trust: Why do web surfers tend to click on the organic listings instead of the pay-per-click ones? It comes down to one simple word – trust. Web surfers tend to trust the organic results over the paid advertisements. As the Internet advances, so does the wisdom and experience of online users. Web surfers are a more sophisticated group today than those that came before them and are able to easily differentiate between organic results and paid advertisements.
3. Unbiased Customers: Since more Web surfers are clicking on organic links versus the paid advertisement links, the organic listings are actually creating more website traffic to those businesses. Not only are the organic listings providing more traffic, but they are also providing a less biased crowd of potential customers than the paid advertisements. In fact, studies actually show that visitors that originated from organic searches are 17 percent more likely to become a customer than those that originated from a click on a paid advertisement.
4. Cost Effectiveness: A lot of decisions in the business world come down to how much it will cost to be successful, whether it is advertising or launching a new product. The good news about using organic search engine listings to grow your company is that this method offers so much potential for success. As an added bonus, organic search engine listings actually cost less overall than pay-per-click campaigns. This is especially true as the cost for pay-per-click advertising campaigns continue to increase as battles usually ensue between companies fighting over competitive keywords.
In some instances this increase in pay-per-click keyword prices on average have seen an increase of as much as 100 percent during high-peak seasons, like the holidays that we are about to embark upon. Organic search engine costs seem to be much more stable in pricing. This is especially true when a business decides to outsource their search engine optimization and marketing to a third party professional SEO marketing company.
Long-term Forecast
It is important to look at the big picture when spending your marketing dollars.
A recent article by Business Week claimed that about 15% of visitors are acccounted for 65% of PPC clicks. Also, the majority of these 15% searchers are in the low-income levels. The chances of these searchers buying products or services are rather slim. They are mainly doing research or looking for some free information. This presents a serious problem for those who rely on pay-per-click for sales or sales leads.
SEO and PPC can compliment each other, insteading working against each other. For many businesses, such as real estate, it can take a very long time for a site to climb up to the top, if it could ever. In general, if you are looking for short-term gain, PPC is the quickest way to get there. However, SEO is a solid long-term strategy for better marketing and stronger ROI.
The long-term forecast for utilizing organic search engine listings to grow your business includes profits and major potential for success. While pay-per-click campaigns may produce results faster than organic search engine listing campaigns, the long-term effects of organic growth are much better. This is because when the funds run out on a pay-per-click campaign, so does your campaign – the campaign is immediately terminated. With organic search engine listings, however, your site is listed in the search results at least until the search engine is scheduled to review sites again for changes and updates to the listings.
