William Charlwood

The answer will depend on the relative economics of your business.  There are several errors that businesses tend to make when choosing between SEO and PPC. The first is not recognising that any traffic that is profitable is profitable.

The goal businesses often focus on is Return on Investment (ROI) whereas what actually matters is profitability (assuming you are not struggling with cash flow issues).

Don’t turn down profitable traffic just because it costs money.

Just because you can get search engine traffic free does not mean that paid-for traffic is no good. If you make £50,000 from free traffic but could make an extra £20,000 by spending £5,000 on PPC traffic you should do it. It will increase your profitability by £15,000 and probably do it fast.

Don’t design your site for SEO and ignore your PPC traffic.

A second problem people have is to focus the design of a site around SEO even if in practice most traffic is coming from PPC. I have seen many cases where a site’s design is centred around search engine rankings with the functionality, and especially the functionality associated with getting the most wanted response, relegated to second place.  If your traffic is largely coming from AdWords you don’t need to worry about designing your landing pages for SEO. You want to focus all your design efforts on converting that traffic into profits.

Let’s now compare the features of SEO traffic versus natural (organic) web traffic.

Speed of implementation.

SEO takes time to deliver results which means the testing cycle is long. Consequently you can end up several months down the road with no benefit. In the worst case you can end up with less SEO traffic than you started with.

PPC on the other hand delivers traffic almost instantly. Results are testable quickly too so you can spot fast campaigns that are profitable and those which are not. Switch off unprofitable campaigns and accelerate the profitable ones.

Web copy

SEO may require you to make changes to your copy which interferes with you getting your most wanted response.  PPC advertising makes few if any demands on your web copy (but watch out for the Google Slap).

The opportunity cost of “free” SEO traffic

SEO traffic is apparently free but don’t forget the hidden opportunity costs of traffic you missed whilst waiting for SEO to deliver. And there is also the cost of actually getting the work done. Of these, the opportunity costs are often the greatest and incredibly easy to overlook simply because they are invisible: you can’t see sales you didn’t get because you weren’t advertising. But you should try and estimate what you could be missing in value terms. To do this you need to have some idea of your visitor value and then estimate how much traffic you could have bought whilst waiting for your SEO work to kick in. Then deduct from this your estimated cost of advertising. The result is going to equate roughly to what you lost in profits by waiting for SEO to work and by not advertising with PPC in the interim.

Get more traffic by appearing twice

Another factor to consider is that there’s a fairly well documented phenomenon relating to how much traffic you get if you appear high up in both natural search results AND in ads on the same page as well. The sum of traffic you get by appearing twice can be significantly greater than the amount of traffic you get if you appear exclusively in natural search or in paid search results. So even if your SEO work has paid off, it can still make sense to use pay per click advertising. As ever though, you need to test the results you actually get because all sites behave differently.

Opportunistic advertising

Whilst it is true that some blogs get ranked very fast for new content, in general new content on a website can take a while to get indexed. This means that if you want to capitalise on a development in the news for example, adding relevant content to your site may not deliver the instant response you want. With AdWords and other PPC advertising, you can effectively get listed almost immediately.

So for example, if you sell suncream and a heatwave is forecast for the weekend, you can put up an ad in 5 minutes to sell suncream online for next day delivery. You can’t do this with SEO.

Reliability

PPC traffic is controllable and reliable whereas SEO traffic is not. So if you build your business around SEO traffic, you are stuffed if the search engines suddenly change the way they rank sites and your site drops from number 2 position to number 56 overnight. Being this vulnerable to a source of traffic is dangerous and not a suitable way to build a business. With PPC, you can always appear on the first page provided you can afford it.

Chasing the Long Tail of Search

With SEO you generally need to focus on your main keywords which means in practice that you do little to attract traffic from the Long Tail of Search. With PPC you can go after as many keywords as you want, instantly. Furthermore, the wider you cast your search net with PPC, the cheaper the clicks can be because there is usually less competition.

Trademarks and PPC keywords

Some PPC companies put restrictions on how you can use trademarks. There used to be a time when you couldn’t use trademarks as keywords and that is changing gradually although each country will have its own legislative framework within which search engines have to operate. The restriction applies more often to the copy of your PPC ads. However, with natural listings, these issues don’t usually arise so if you want to use a trademark in a suitable way on your site, it may well show up in the natural listings even if you are not able to use it in your PPC campaigns.