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SEO Or PPC | Which One Is Better For Small Businesses? 
By: Solomon Rothman 2007-02-15 Neither one in principle is better then the other. If you can use both to increase your revenue, then please do so. What I want to discuss in this article is what direction makes sense when you're working with a very limited online marketing budget.
I believe smaller companies in markets with heavy PPC competition would probably see more of a return on their investment by using those resources for an organic SEO campaign combined with some targeted website advertising (like buying sponsored listing on appropriate portals and niche directories.) I'll illustrate this with an example that uses a hypothetical business in the real estate industry with a small online marketing budget of $10,000 per year to spend on online advertising / marketing. This $10,000 is solely for online purposes and would be in addition to print, television, display advertising and of course website administration fees etc. In a competitive landscape that 10,000 may only buy the customer 500 - 2,000 visits after having to pay someone to setup and manage the PPC campaign for them. That's not very much, so if their conversion ratio wasn't really high, this small amount of traffic probably would not generate a large amount of income for them in comparison to other techniques. A small business could attempt to run the PPC campagin themsevles, but then they'd be out both the per click costs in addition to all the money that would probably get wasted on internal labor costs in addition to the learning curve for success (think analytics, conversion ratios, ad testing etc). This is probably the number 1 reason why I run into many clients who tried PPC and ended up blowing through thousands of dollars with relatively no results. If you gave that same budget of $10,000 to a quality search engine marketer for use on an intensive SEO campaign, the client's site could easily rank for a hundred plus terms including most of the searches they would be buying like "city state real estate." They'd get more traffic, but more importantly SEO tactics add permanent value to a client's website. PPC sends fleeting traffic, if you stop paying it goes away. SEO on the other hand opens up new markets and creates permanent avenues to draw traffic and attract new customers to your site. SEO can also work cumulatively depending on the campaign specifics. Meaning you'd see some great results after the first year, then more results the next year and the traffic would continue to go up and up as your online presence increased. Even if you stopped paying for SEO services the traffic and value they created for your site would not go away. This is the number 1 reason why I believe that for small businesses with a limited online marketing budget; SEO is the way to go! There are of course exceptions to any rule. If a website couldn't be ranked easily organically then PPC may be the only profitable avenue of approach. For example if you want to sell internet marketing e-books and your website is 3 pages. That's going to be almost impossible to rank organically with those resources. Those words are extremely competitive and this example site doesn't have enough content or the right kind of content to attract quality links. If customers "like" the sales pitch on the site, the website owner could potentially build a profitable online business based on getting PPC traffic and converting it. SEO is a "cottage" industry and there is a very wide variety of services that "experts" offer. At it's core successful SEO requires marketing knowledge and creativity in addition to technical proficiency. PPC on the other hand is a lot more straight forward. In order to reap the benefits I describe above, a small business owner will have to find a search engine marketer who knows his stuff and doesn't charge $400 an hour. That very well could present a bit of a challenge ( I'm available - hint hint ) Comments Tag: SEO, PPC, Small Business Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Reddit |  Furl Have a bookmark! -  About the Author: Solomon Rothman is the CIO for Social Media Systems; an online marketing company that helps its client succeed by providing web development bundled with search marketing. He authors numerous blogs including 3net Search Engine Marketing Blog and loves the ongoing challenges of the online marketing world. Besides technology, Solomon's other passions including filmmaking & screenwriting. |
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