When faced with this issue of PPC or Organic marketing I tell the potential client this... PPC is a good short term way to increase the value of your website. However, when you stop paying money the value of your company falls with your placement. Organic on the other hand is a long term investment that will increase the value of your compay and give you more selling potential in the future. When you stop paying someone to work on your marketing the value of your site will increase with age from the work put in. I usually work in both options put a percent towards PPC for immidiate results, then budget some time for Organic marketing. 2 Birds 1 Stone. Thanks Steve Fagaly
I take a pretty radical stance with my clients. I tell them that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two completely different things. This is how I explain it: SEM, like any marketing function, involves paying for the delivery an advertising message in an attempt to gain customers to make sales or to promote brand awareness. You take how much you spend, figure out how many sales derived from your effort, bump that up against how much you made, and figure out if that campaign was effective. Marketing is typically conducted to promote a service or product that already exists and is immediately available. SEO doesn't work like that. The best time to optimize your site is pre-production. Do good SEO as you build your site and you won't have to do anything more except a tweak here and there from then on out. It's a lot easier to do SEO up front than go back and redo it later. The concern my clients have with SEO (at least the concern they've expressed to me) is that it's not easily measured and there's no guarantee. I can tell my clients with confidence, "Do what I say, and I guarantee you'll get more traffic from organic results in 6 months than you do now. But I can't guarantee a number placement on Google or any other provider. Any SEO provider who claims they can guarantee a particular position in organic results is either not being truthful or is using less-then-ethical methods that are just as likely to get you banned as ranked." SEO is not marketing. SEO is building a site in such a way that it's easily found, crawled, indexed, themed, and ranked by search engines. You don't see results in a week, or even a month. You can't directly calculate a return on investment. If you're thinking about investing in SEO, do a baseline analysis of your traffic to determine: 1. The average number of unique visitors per day over the last three months 2. The average number of page views per day over the last three months 3. The average number of referrals per day you get from search results pages Now do your SEO, wait 6 months, and repeat the above. If the results are the same, or only a little bit above where they were, then your SEO wasn't effective. But if there's a significant difference, and you've got a good deal more traffic from search results than you did before, it probably was. Collateral to this (for the purpose of putting out non-reciprocal links) I also recommend submitting to directories using keyword rich and varying anchor text and engaging a copywriter to write press releases and articles related to the company business.
I like to tell my clients that SEO is a terrific branding tool. Just ask Starbucks or Apple. While these two brands rank for enormously competetive keywords like coffee and music downloads, the same principals apply to smaller niches. For any niche, SEO can really put a company's name on the map.
Raider, I like how you put that, I aggree. Shortened up. SEO: Optimize your site. SEM: Market your site to spots on the net. sounds very smart.
no offense, I kinda thought that Starbucks and Apple had branding before and Internet came into play... Steve
I believe to gain an edge on the ever growing competition you should explore both Organic Search and some Paid Advertising options. They both have an important place on the internet for a websites growth. I also noticed after talking to a handful of people almost split down the middle. One half only looks at the PPC ( Adwords text ads ) and the other never looks at the Adwords text ads. I think you should use every availible option with in reason to be sure to capture the attention of both sides equaly.
Many companies require both heavy SEO and heavy SEM. I haven't had to explain the difference in a long time.
I agree pixel. and good points... haha, but to Crazy... the topic was PPC vs. Organic. not SEO/SEM... but that is a good topic... Steve
SEO = optimization to rank well in organic results SEM = PPC (SEM is specifically Search Engine Marketing, not Internet Marketing) Other internet marketing (banner ads, pops, newsletters, emails, etc) are seperate from the above two, IMO. You might even break SEO into two categories; On-site and Off-site, with on-site being the architecture/content of the site and off site being link building.