Hi everyone, I recently started up a service oriented company in an industry who's marketing roots are all in cold calling based business to business sales. I see a tremendous opportunity to attract new customers by driving them to contact me via SEO. This is a strategy that I do not believe has been widely realized by the industry leaders. My question is, being a startup without a huge advertising budget, would it be wiser to spend time and effort with proven SEO techniques as opposed to the pay per click option?
i would rather go with the proven SEO techniques first then you can also try the pay per click option but not as the main source of income.
Well, the Pay per Click option will get you immediate results, and will place you on Google Pg. 1 when the Campaign is launched. The only problem is that when you stop paying, the ads are gone too. Where as you when you get a good listing via Organic ranking, it's there to stay. And you don't have to keep paying for it as with Pay-per-click! Hope this helps!
Horses for courses I guess, they both have very different advantages and strengths. I would suggest an initial CPC campaign would help you understand the important keywords within your niche and work out which would be worth investing your time and money for a SEO campaign. Whilst undertaking this market research you should have a strong position on the first page of google and generate some income whilst your SEO kicks in. Once you have a strong natural presence for your keywords go back to CPC and plug any gaps, long tail and targeted keywords with an advert. Another thought would be have two adverts (natural and CPC) on the same page and double your chances of a click
Tekpro, your approach depends on how aggressive you are about growth. Paid Search should always be part of your strategy if you want to grow more rapidly. Rely purely on SEO if you want to have the lowest cost of customer acquisition.
AA's advice in post 4 is spot on. I also recommend doing both. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Like the stock market, diversify your portfolio. Zee said: > when you get a good listing via Organic ranking, it's there to stay. That's not true. You could lose your ranking. You still have to work to try and maintain it. Competitors behind you are trying the same to catch up.
You can get better results from PPC if your site is SEO optimized and has good quality targeted backlinks. If you already have organic targeted traffic, you cost per click will be much lower, lowering your break even point. I would go for SEO first.
SEO is 10 times better, mainly due to the fact that there's no risk involved. So if your landing page isn't as awesome as you thought it was, then you don't have to worry about money being lost, you can just keep tweaking it and monitoring it based on the free traffic you're receiving.
You should do both moderately - as aforementioned you should not be entirely dependent on paid clicks, though they are useful. Building up your organic result manually is a hard to measure progression, it pays off though for sure.
I also agree that you should do both. PPC has an immediate return and requires some of the same basic skills as SEO. It takes a while to get good traction from SEO. You can always start your PPC campaign with a very small budget so the risk is minimal. FYI, after two years of effort on one site in particular, I still get more profit and audience from PPC than SEO, but the profit margin is much higher for SEO. But the SEO audience continues to grow at a decent pace.
No risk?? Maybe you mean monetarily wise. What about the risk of putting in lots of work into SEO but not being able to rank high enough? How about if you do rank but nobody clicks your link? Or they do click but don't convert? I qualify those as risks which in the meantime you're not making any revenues. Sure, maybe you haven't lost money but you may have lost time. What is it they say? Oh, yeah, time is money. Also, define ten times better, that's quite a statement.