There is an old argument, whether a business should focus its marketing spend on PPC, SEO or a combination of the two. There are clear advantages and disadvantages to both.

Â
SEO

A new website, in a competitive industry, is going to find it difficult to get rankings on high-traffic keywords quickly. Even with an established website, it’s unlikely that you are going to rank highly on every term that you would like to.

Consider Next, for example. They have a decent range of garden furniture, but don’t rank on the first two pages naturally for the keyword ‘garden furniture’.

It can take a long time for SEO to show any kind of return on investment, and the nature of the business is that it’s quite opaque – whilst you can see the overall impact of the work that you’ve done, you can’t see exactly what caused your rankings to improve.

And you’ll probably have to do quite a lot of work redesigning your website in order to optimise your search results, which requires additional cost and resource.

But SEO has clear advantages, as well. Once you get a high position for a keyword, you can get a lot of traffic very cheaply, and even if you stop spending completely for a short time, you may well retain your positions.

Typically, SEO results pick up most of the clicks, though the exact percentage varies dramatically, depending on which study you read.

There is also a ‘halo-effect’ with SEO. As well as getting rankings for the keywords that you are targeting, you will also get rankings for searches so long and obscure that no PPC advert would ever appear. A commonly-quoted statistic is that 50% of all searches on Google are unique. Trying to chase these with PPC would be impossible even using Broad Match, but with SEO, you raise the profile of the whole website in the eyes of the search engines.

Â
PPC

There are three clear advantages to PPC. You can get instant results for any keyword that you want to appear for, you can control your message very easily and you can see exactly what you are getting for your money.

On the other hand, with the exceptions of the savings that you’ll get by improving your Quality Score, the cost of PPC is unlikely to improve dramatically over time. You can improve your adverts, and adjusts your bids in order to get as many sales or leads as possible at an acceptable cost, but after a while, improvements will become harder and harder to achieve.

Next appear top for ‘garden furniture’ in the PPC results, a position that they can maintain thanks to having a good range of products, reasonably priced, a recognised brand name and deep pockets.

Perhaps the biggest problem with PPC is that you need to list all of the keywords that you want to appear for. Using Phrase or Broad Matching to expand your keyword list can help here, but you are likely to appear for keywords that aren’t relevant.

This is, of course, true with SEO as well, but with SEO, you aren’t paying per click, so it doesn’t really matter if you appear for things that aren’t that relevant.

Â
The Answer

The answer to the question is that both PPC and SEO offer clear and distinct advantages to advertisers. Perhaps the question, then, is how best to get the most out of the two, and use them to complement each other, rather than cannibalising each other.

By looking at your PPC results, you can see exactly how much traffic is available on keywords, and how well that traffic is likely to convert. Since you can only target a limited number of keywords for SEO, this can give you a clear guide of where your efforts would best be targeted.

Also, PPC allows you to experiment with different advertising messages. If you have a number of different USP’s, for example, you can test them using Adwords (serving each up 50% of the time, and seeing which generate clicks and conversions), and then transfer your results into your natural search results.

There is clearly an advantage to appearing twice on the search results as well. It’s not surprising that somebody is more likely to visit your website if you have two adverts rather than just one, and a lot of searchers probably won’t even realise that they are for the same company, particularly if your messages are different.

Whether or not you should use PPC, SEO, or a combination of both, really is a decision for every business to make for themselves. But the natural synergy between the two is sufficient that for the vast majority of businesses, it is certainly worth doing both, if marketing budgets allow.

 

 

Steve Baker & Guy Mains