Here’s his question:
Would I be wise to consider diverting some money away from the Google Ads campaigns and toward more of an SEO approach?
The short answer is YES! It is wise to consider working toward more rankings and traffic using SEO as opposed to simply paying money to Google Ads forever. For those who don’t know, SEO is search engine optimization with the goal of increasing your organic rankings in Google search results. You can think of SEO as gaining free website traffic vs paid website traffic that comes from advertising. While organic traffic feels free in the long term, it usually requires an investment of time and money on the front end.
For most business owners, I would recommend utilizing both advertising and organic rankings in some form, and to further answer the initial question, I’ll go through a brief comparison of each.
Long-Term vs Short-Term – SEO vs PPC
SEO is a long-term approach. Most reputable SEO agencies SHOULD be up-front in telling you that if you’re spending around $500/month you shouldn’t expect to see a substantial increase in traffic for around 6 months. The trade-off here and the major upside to SEO, however, is that an increase in exposure could last for years and produce traffic for a very long time!
I won’t get into the details of SEO here as I could do hundreds of videos on that topic alone. But if you want to get a bit more information, you can check out my SEO playlist on Youtube.
On the other hand, pay-per-click (PPC) is a short-term or immediate approach. You could put a campaign up today and get clicks within a matter of hours or even get calls or sales within the same day. These speedy results make PPC very attractive to many clients. Let’s face it – in the current internet information age we’re living in, we all want fast results!
Measuring Results from SEO
The success of SEO can be difficult to measure. While there are many ways to approach effective SEO and hundreds of factors that play into rankings, there aren’t many ways to accurately correlate an increase in traffic with the tasks being performed in my opinion. You should be wary if any SEO agency claims to give guaranteed results or exact correlations between their work and rankings increases.
Many factors can play into an increase in traffic even including what your competitors are doing. Ideally, if you’re spending money on SEO, you’ll see upward trends in site traffic over the long-term.
With PPC you can track traffic and conversions quite effectively. You can see exactly how many calls or form submissions came directly from that campaign. This allows you to measure results against your spend to get an accurate idea of your return on investment. Since it’s a lot easier to measure, it’s much more intuitive to optimize.
Starting and Stopping Campaigns
SEO is difficult to turn on and turn off. If you’re paying an SEO agency, then you might be on a 12-month contract
With PPC, you can turn a campaign on and off with a couple clicks. You also have great control in determining the schedule of your campaigns, allowing you to run only on weekends or any time of the day you choose.
So, ultimately there are quite a few differences between SEO and PPC, but that is exactly why I often recommend that clients utilize both.
While I don’t offer SEO services myself, I do offer PPC services. If you want to learn how I can help, click HERE to find out more. Comment below if you have any thoughts or questions. And if you have an unrelated question, head over to WEask.tv and ask it in text, audio, or video form.