An associate, seeking my opinion, recently forwarded a post from her newsgroup which included the statement below : "If you are able to achieve a good pagerank, you will have little need for a paid campaign through Adwords." The author of this post is of firm belief that SEO is without question the single best way to attract customers to your Web site. I ran a quick check of five popular retail ecommerce sites with pageranks from 6-10 and found Adwords ads on four of them. This seems dispute the statement above. The determination of the credibility of the statement above is important for both me and my associate. Advice would be appreciated.
If you have a really high ranking, then you may already get a lot of traffic, depending on the keywords you're ranking high for. However a high ranking is not the same as a high page rank. Another point is that SEO can take a while (days, months, or longer) to get a ranking on the first page. But with a good PPC campaign, you can get coverage on the first page fairly quickly. You could always start out with PPC and then work on the SEO so that you don't have any traffic downtime.
The statement does not make sense. There is always "need" for paid search if the conversion ratio is favorable.
Paid search even with high page ranking allows you to cover more space on the given keywords. If you have two results on the page of 20 results versus 1 thats going to increase visotrs to your site and if its the right traffic driven with strong keywords you will get more conversions. Hope that helps. -Patz
2 spots are better than 1... you cover more space, even if you have to pay for some of it, its well worth the investment. Plus the person who probably wrote that article is probably so blinded by SEO he does not even consider PPC as an option. It work the same vice a verse. SEO is nice since you dont have to pay per click, but if you add up all the man hours and link buying required to get that top spot, there is still a price behind each click. If you pay an SEO expert $500 - $1000 a month for those premium SEO spots then each SEO click has a value. SEO really isn't as free as you think. From the view of a PPC expert, why dump thousands of dollars into link building and the man hours to "maybe" get a spot on google when I can be on the cover in minutes. I can there for write the same article in view of a PPC expert "If you are able to achieve a good quality score in adwords, you will have little need to hire an SEO expert to maybe get listed in google"
I don't agree with this statement. Page Rank is not the only thing, in fact page rank is not the guarantee of getting top position in SERPs. Adwords is helpful in getting immediate visibility on SE's (in sponsored links). I think it depends on your current needs and circumstances. Generally if you are looking to generate traffic quickly and can afford an advertising budget then preference can Google Adwords. Certainly if your website is brand new then SEO is probably not the route for you as it can take some months before Google will take new sites seriously enough to rank them for their organic searches.