Which one should you pick Search Engine Optimization or Pay Per Click – ideally, though, you’re picking both
SEO or PPC Which One Should You Choose
Ideally though, you’re picking both.
I think it also comes down to are you looking for immediate results or long-term results cos you’re not going to get immediate results as SEO and long-term results are going to cost you nothing less than PPC. So, that kind of question, which one is better for increasing business, has so many caveats and other questions need to be asked. If you’re going to sit in a meeting with a client and says that to you, asks you that question, you need to fire off about ten or twenty questions to be able to come close to answering that for that particular business.
Do you sit down with a client and first meeting with them and they say “I want to start doing online marketing, I’m not sure which one I should do, should I do PPC or SEO, which one is going to help my business first?” What kind of questions do you ask to kind of help them answer that question?
Dear God, we need a whole day but I guess, the first question would be ‘have you done either one yet?’ Have you had results yet with pay per click? If he hasn’t done paper click yet, it’s also a lot of work, I mean, it’s not immediate. Yes, we can get traffic to your site but is it going to be the right traffic or the right message; is your site ready for pay per click or any traffic for that matter?
That part is huge, I see that all the time. Some sites, it doesn’t matter how much business or traffic we send them, nothing’s going to convert because their sites got off or don’t have messaging, it doesn’t have calls to action. You can imagine why my head is spinning with questions.
I think a lot of times you can ask all these questions, you can get the answers, and from doing fairly well, ‘the website’s not horrible and has the opportunity to convert?’, I think one of the best ways to answer this question with unlimited information is ‘neither one of those is the best option to increase your business, it’s a combination of both of them together that’s going to work best to increase your business.
Does PPC improve your SEO?
There’s definitely a lot of things that you can get from PPC that will help improve your SEO, believe it or not, having their brand exposure and search is going to help your PPC long-term, like you know, there’s a study done a few years ago that said if you show up in the result in both the PPC and the organic spaces on the search results page, both of them over time see improved click-through rates.
So, working those two together is probably the best solution for a business but finding the right strategy, figuring out where you need to put your priorities really depends on dozens of questions that you have to ask.
And it really depends too on your product, whether or not pay per click’s going to be worthwhile to you, even if there’s a huge amount of competition and your products has very small margins, you better have some very inexpensive click rates which frankly are rare these days. There are a lot of variables there obviously, but I do know clients who don’t do it all because pay per click does so well, I mean, we’ve convinced them to do SEO but their return on investment on pay per click is exceptional.
And obviously don’t do SEO by yourself either, I mean, I’ve always been the likes of you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. You know, if you’re just doing SEO and not paper clicking, obviously there’s algorithm shift that kills you, that’s a ton of your business that’s just gone. If you’re doing PPC and not SEO and all of a sudden there comes a bidding war and your budgets are just eaten away immediately, then you’re out of luck there as well.
It should be a good balance of the two and obviously other types of marketing as well but if you’re just looking at search, you need to balance the PPC and SEO.
And I usually tell people, when you’re first starting a website and you want to spend money in marketing, make sure you have a good PPC budget to start because that’s going to give you some immediate results as you’re building the equity in your SEO side of the business. As the equity builds and you start seeing results from the organic, you can pull back on PPC and start balancing out those investments in those two types of things.
Content Is Not King, It’s Core. For some reason didn’t like the idea content of me saying content is not king but I think it would have a really valuable to the people because, some people got a really good point about everybody trying to do this but think about it from a more greater perspective, think about your topics.
If you are a bank and you are writing an article on your website about how a 401K works because you want people to come in and talk about series of 401K programs and possibly enroll and buy one for you.
How many thousands and thousands of articles are on the Internet about how a 401K plan works, you’re not going to be able to write an outstanding article about that’s significantly different than every other article out there about how 401Ks work because they only work one way; maybe there might be slight variances in different kinds but there’s nothing that you’re going to create around that, that is so dramatically different than everybody else and that’s going to propel you to the top of the search rankings, and that happens in not just that category, there are tons of different topics that fall into that same situation and in that case, content is not king, there’s only so much you can write about how 401K works and it’s going to be the same primarily as the way everybody else wrote about how 401ks work,
So, what’s here to think about is content is core – don’t get me wrong, you still have to have good quality sound educational entertaining, however, you want to do it – but you have to have good content, but it’s not king, it’s a core, it has to be there. But you have to do things to it and around it to make it work for you as a business.
There’s three ways your content can be found from my perspective.
- Actively – someone actively goes out and looks for what you have, and search, in order to make that content work in search, you have to optimize it – SEO.
- Passive – people find you passively, they’re sitting on Facebook and this post pops up in front of them, that’s your content. An email (your content), that’s passive and the best way to do it passively is by socializing the content, that’s social media, you’re dealing social media.
- Targeted – so, you got SEO for the active content, you’ve got social for the passive content, the third way is Targeted – there is people you know as a business that will be interested in your content and you pay money to put it in front of them – PPC.
Those are the three primary ways to get content found on the Internet but you have to have that core content and you have to have those three things around it to make it work. If you got a great piece of content about how a 401K works and you want people to read it, it’s not going to just show up on its own anymore.
And it also depends on the market. If you’re a local market, if you’re pushing local and really that’s all that matters to you, let’s say you’re a dentist or something, if you have a great article about Dental Implants and the Newest Technology, a little spin not just ‘what is a dental implant’, you could have the ame article, obviously not the exact same writing because that would be duplicate, but…
The same falls under the category people are actively looking for under this search and optimization piece, the SEO piece order. You have to have the SEO piece, you pretty much have to have the socialization piece and it really helps if you have the promotional piece on it to really get that content work for your business.
Content is still core to everything we do but it might be time for us not to only write content and expect it work for you, take half of that content and create some budget and now put into that optimization, socialization and promotional piece to go around the content you are creating to make it work better for you.
And try different types of content like video and podcast. Podcasts are exploding right now, it seems everyone’s getting one.
And I can tell you when people ask me about content, one of the first thing I do is say “well, define content”, and they’re like “what do you mean? “It’s on my web page”. Content is every single thing on the Internet, everything, everything on the Internet is content no matter what you’re talking about. And if you’re leveraging every type in some way or another testing it or trying it, you’re missing an opportunity.