When to use PPC over SEO
Posted in Search Engine Marketing on 10th August 2011

I often get asked this kind of question, so thought i'd address it in the blog. When it comes to online marketing it's not really as straight forward a question as it seems. Firstly, I don't think that you should ever employ an either or approach to SEO or PPC (Pay-per-click advertising). Pay per click marketing is using an advert agency such as Google Adwords, which is where you can place an advert within the search engine results. All major search engines have this functionality and they typically make up the majority of the search engines income.

But, back to the question.. When it comes to the two different marketing approaches, they both have pros and cons. SEO should be a key aspect from the very start of your website development. It shouldn't be an afterthought because once you have your system in place, it just means a lot of tinkering to get it to be more search engine friendly. But a strong performing website can take time to build up especially if you find yourself in a tough market, with some big hitting companies, who have a team of staff to service the site, update it, edit its content and add even more high quality content to it. This is the kind of situation where implementing a PPC campaign could be of benefit to you. Your site, doesn't have the domain authority, age, trust that is going to help it rank highly in an organic sense, these things all come with time. But that doesn't mean that you can't get on to page #1 in Google, Yahoo or Bing. Admittedly if you have some big companies in your market, then expect them to use PPC to bolster their own ranking power and visibility. But there are still plenty of spaces on page #1 and every subsequent page. You don't need to pay a huge amount of money for these adverts either, you only pay when someone clicks on them and often these adverts are only pence of a small amount of dollars, the question is, would you pay me $2 to put you in touch with somebody who wants a service that you offer?? Probably is the answer. With Google Adwords, you can manage your budget, so there are no nasty surprises when you see your invoice, if you put down a daily limit of $1 then that's the most you'll pay. The adverts themselves are written by you and they take the key phrases and keywords you specify, you can also weed out any problematic phrases or search queries by using negative keywords. We run a few Adwords campaigns here and there are a couple of markets that we operate in which are highly competitive, our clients simply don't have the finances or staff to compare against some of these companies, despite ranking on page #1 for some terms, there are a lot of other terms that are simply too competive for their budget. so we looked at their niche and used Google Adwords, for very little investment one of our clients has pulled in over $160,000 over the last 3 months. An ROI of approximately $1800 - you can't argue with that really.

In conclusion, never rely one just one idea, SEO is king and should be your priority for longevity, but PPC can be a great foot in the door, especially when dealing with a competitive market.