What strategy is best to implement, free SEO or paid PPC like Adwords? Well, my guess was free SEO, OK, it may take a bit longer....but at least it's free right? But analysing this over a period of time, it seems that are only a few words that you can optimise a website for - like maybe ten or so - certainly not hundreds else you would lose your site's focus. So these few words would have to be chosen very carefully if you are to reap the best rewards. But how do you know by using SEO the keywords you have chosen are the correct ones? You may think they are when you first choose them after doing some research....but how can you actually prove they are successful? After all I guess it takes around 30-40 days or more for SEO results to come in, so it is difficult to assess if these few main keywords are really productive. With PPC however, when done properly, you can choose keywords that are not really expensive, and start testing - and getting results - almost straight away. OK, you would have to be more specific than normal so you don't blow your whole budget...but this can be a good thing. For example, if your site was dealing with golf products, instead of bidding for "Ping golf clubs" you could bid for "Ping IST2". This would be cheaper...and bring in more qualified and targeted traffic as it is a more specific term. So I guess a strategy maybe then to set up a proper, affordable PPC campaign, then for a short time test which keywords are most successful, then you can use those tested and proven keywords that you have got quickly for your long term SEO campaign. Using both in sync could result in only one winner. You
It all depends... If I was going to sell a product then I would most likely just do PPC. If I was making a site to make money off of links, ads, affiliates, ect then I would go with SEO. Your right though that you really dont know if its a good keyword until you try. Thats the sucky part.
what i do is test with adwords first, to see if there is any possible ROI and to figure out if the SEO work will be worth it.. if there are no conversions with PPC then i give up the project but if people are actually buying what i have to sell then i'll invest the money in a SEO compaign.
As a business selling products, we do both. If we rank naturally in the top 3 it's not as important for us to spend the ppc money. If we don't rank well, we use ppc and then work on seo for those keywords. We also focus seo in the most expensive keywords to maximize our ad budget. I think it really needs to be a mix. We rank extremely well for a lot of our keywords (we are pretty diverse, we literally could have thousands of keywords and combos) and our ppc budget runs us about $20,000 less a month than some of our competitors. In our case, seo really pays off in the long run.
I suppose it would depend on your budget. Yes SEO testing can take time. Even though you do keywords search and all that you will still be competing against others who are using the same keywords, especially if it is a broad one at that. for that you can also focus it more so it becomes more of a niche keyword and take it from there. But you won't know instantly if it will work, you need to do split tests on that to see which ones work and which ones don't.
Well, it depends on what kind of ATTACK are going to do... If are more more after on ranking, do SEO. If you are more after on sales, and you have some money to spend, do PPC. But in my own point of view, in long run, SEO is good.
PPC is a waste of money. PCC $1000 = 2000 hits for a one off fee Buy $1000 worth of articles (you'll get about 250) add them to the high PR directories and you'll get around 100 hits every single month forever.
acedalright... the reality is that people have been making millions with adwords and ppc for years.. if you know what you are doing, then every 2k you spend will make you 5k.. 5k minus 2k = 3k of benefits, i am not an expert in PPC, but try to hang out in the affiliate sections of DP, you will find that a lot of DP members are making 100k to millions per year with just PPC... so just don't say it is a "waste of money" because it's not.
I agree. We can't say blatantly that PPC is a total waste of money. Well, it is for those who don't know how to use it wisely. I have seen some of local folks who is making 5 to 6 figures monthly too from PPC selling clickbank products.
nice post . i am a SEOer,so i am also very interested in SEM & PPC. but i have no idea about learning them . can someone recommend one book about it to me ? thank you in advance!
I feel ppc is definately good, especially to get short term results if you use it correctly. It is also useful to go for ORGANIC seo because if you can target the correct key words, in the long term this can help drive traffic to your site. As with everything, you have to put the time and effort in to gain the benefits.
First of all I want to point out one wrong fact. SEO is NOT FREE. It needs money to derive the strategy. It needs money to pay the resources who are working. It needs money for link development. It also needs money for maintenance. I certainly agree that SEO needs patience and it takes lot of efforts. As said you can not target for hundred keywords. But it is really worth to wait. PPC on the other hand is very much useful to target audience with precise accuracy. A marketer must be aware to use SEO and PPC to his fullest benefit. As said SEO + PPC = Success...
Its all about ROI (return on investment) - if you are expecting big bucks from a product then use PPC & SEO. (notice you should use both) If you are trying to earn a passive income then use PPC warilily as it can easily bite you. When simply hosting a blog with ads - try to do it with SEO only. Then you would only need to spend time and not money to get visitors to your site. Golden rule - Selling? PPC & SEO. Info site? SEO.
i agree with mluther seo is so important to most site . if you didnt have a high quality webpage, your conversion must be very poor.
It entirely depends on the products. When I was working for the chemical and oil industry we found that using PPC on most keywords was a gold mine. But for many keywords it wasn't profitable (i.e. would cost more to get the nessesary number of customers to finally make a sale). For this SEO was the way forward. But I've also heard people say they use PPC to find out up front if a term is worth optimising. After all, there must be nothing more annoying than spending xx number of hours promoting a site and optimising a keyword and for that keyword to bring a crap quality of visitor to your site.