Pay Per Click (PPC) vs Organic SEO? Which is Best?

My Internet Marketing and SEO Blog

23 October 2008 1,478 views No Comment

Google adwords and its pay per click (PPC) has made many garage based business grow to full fledge businesses. But is google adwords and its pay per click program a viable solution for all businesses? well not ways…

I have nothing but love for PPC but I have reservation about how businesses use it and more importantly become dependant on it to run their business.

There is one major reason why I prefer organic SEO to pay per click: the trend of the PPC cost is going nowhere but to the roof. With More businesses going online to grab a piece of the pie so does the demand for that sponsored ad space. It goes without saying that high demand means higher pay per click cost. In certain industries that cost goes up to $15/click. Ok… so does that dismiss the use of Pay Per Click advertizing? The answer is no… there are several scenarios where PPC should and should not be used:

The 80/20 rule
Remember that the same rules applies in pay per click 80% of your budget will go towards 20% of the keywords you are targeting. I say it makes sense to free your business for that budget dependancy. Promoting your business organically for those keywords will be a smarter investment than depending on the sky rocketing cost of PPC.

Organic SEO vs Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click to test the waters
One way to really gage the potential response and demand for a product is by running an SEO campaign. Run over a period of 3 months or so will give you a very good idea of what keywords are researched, from what parts of the country, what is the click through rate and conversion rate among other business intelligence data.
Use Pay Per Click for low competition keywords and for non core competitive Keywords
It does not make sense to deplete your pay per click budget in terms that are most relevant to your business. Your most relevant keywords are going to be the costlier. To position your business as a leader you need to show up on the first rankings… Organic rankings, besides being the most cost effective strategy, will also yield higher conversion rates.
Make up for sudden loss of search engine rankings
“Hey Moe what happened to the rankings today the phone stopped ringing!” My phone rings off the hook everytime google goes through an update… That is a great time to jump start that phone with a ppc campaign while the rankings stabilize.