SEO, PPC, or ROI?

A few interesting points in this forum post.

I would always recommend a PPC approach initially, whether you are starting a new business or just launching a website. A PPC camapign is one of the most valuable experiments you can engage your company in. Why? Because...

• All the costs are controllable. Despite PPC being more costly than SEO in the long run, most PPC modules (particularly Google), are really versatile and allow you to terminate excess costs at the click of a button. Most changes you make to a PPC campaign take effect immediately and there are a number of other upper limits that you can place on your campaign budget to stop it getting out of hand- you can set a maximum cost-per-click and set a maximum daily budget.
  
  Investing in a PPC campaign will help you to get to grips with tracking all aspects of your business on or off the web. Implementing a robust tracking strategy, working closely with your optimiser, and calculating ROI on every penny spent will significantly reduce the experimental element involved in any marketing campaign.
  
  
• PPC costs money; SEO costs time. Whilst conventional SEO promises to deliver a higher ROI than any PPC campaign I would argue that it is not entirely the case because the overall time and skills needed for optimisation, work out to be a more expensive cost-per-click. Furthermore optimisation is significantly slower to deliver results or a return. You are looking at least a 3 month lead time before you start seeing any results that are really worth writing home about- can your business survive that long? Most startups and small businesses are loathe to frittering money away and they need to generate a return before they can invest further time and energy into their marketing.
  
  
• PPC automatically handles the most important aspect of your campaign. The most crucial thing you need to generate business from the web (after a website!) is a visible market position. This concept can be summed up as: "first page rankings on the search engine results pages". The vast majority of business on the web takes place through the first page of search engine listings. Over 90% of search engine users do not look beyond the first page of listings and 80% of these users only click the top three results. So that is basically where the market is: in the top three results, on the first page of search engine listings. To position yourself there is easy: pay the search engines a few pence per-click to stick your site at the top of the first page in the 'sponsored results?' sections (generally displayed as the top three results).
  
  
• PPC generates more results faster. Remember that if you really want to turn your website into a lead generation machine you need to be looking for high performance figures on at least three sets of results:
  
  
  1. Rankings
     
  2. Traffic
     
  3. Conversion
  
  
  As I mentioned above PPC delivers set 1 results immediately upon setup and starts generating set 2 figures from going live. Delivering set 3 results from PPC is only a matter of time. SEO, by contrast, takes at least a month before it is delivering high rankings, which stalls the overall performance of your campaign by about two months. Only after your site has "come alive" with traffic can you start to divine the user experience and properly identify the problems to iron out that may be stopping your users from converting to customers (e.g. poor usability, lack of information, hidden information, faulty emails and links). Implementing a PPC campaign leaps your site to the top of the search engines and immediately starts delivering traffic within 24hrs. Within a month you will know whether your site is converting or not. Before you know it you'll have identified your dead email, made the registration form less time consuming, and thought about a re-design that includes all those other things you always wanted to provide your users.
  
  
• SEO makes what works, work harder. This post is not about dissing SEO, if you got this impression, let me correct you. Contrary to current hype, SEO is alive and well. It is the only website marketing option that can deliver high rankings, traffic, and conversion at absolutely no cost-per-click. Basically SEO is the perfect compliment you can pay to your successful PPC campaign and the best way to spend your ROI. Mimic your success by targeting the same market position with SEO and cut out the long term (and probably escalating) pay-per-click costs entirely.