PPC doesn’t kick SEO’s Butt, neither does SEO beat the hell out of PPC to reach the goal

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by Geno Thampi - 10/11/2012 8357 Views

Shouldn’t PPC and SEO be friends?

SEO Vs PPC The war between PPC and SEO is a never ending debate. Gathering opinion on the current internet marketing trends after the penguin 1.2 update last week, I was able to see that 5 of 50 people that I spoke strongly believe that PPC has an upper hand over the organic SEO. Adding fuel to this statement, I came across something today while reading the SEO news and updates. The article titled “7 Ways PPC Kicks SEO’s Butt” and the following were listed as the points:

PPC has more control
You can gain category leadership with PPC
PPC comes with increased visibility in the search results
Fast results can be obtained with PPC
PPC offers better service (What does that mean?)
You get the real analytics data (The point highlighted is that organic search keywords doesn’t show up in analytics if the searchers where logged in)
The PPC world has less algorithm changes

If this is how PPC wins over SEO, I can provide you some facts that prove otherwise:

How PEOPLE think PPC kicks SEO’s Butt	This is how SEO reacts!
PPC has more control	SEO agrees that PPC has more control as it plays with money. PPC gets you control over the keyword visibility and even offer flexibility over the choice of the landing page. However… PPC doesn’t have control over people’s mind! Organic search results still get more than 85% of the clicks. So with only 15% clicks to bag, more control doesn’t justify the purpose.
Fast results can be obtained with PPC	Yes, PPC is fast in getting the visitors to the website However…. What happens if you stop or minimize the budget? The traffic is gone instantly too. But in terms of SEO, once the results are obtained, the results would be steady.
You gain category leadership with PPC	According to the post, even small companies can attain the leadership of McD’s by showing up in the first pages as sponsored ads. However… The sad fact about PPC is that 86% of the people trust organic listings compared to the PPC and sponsored listings
PPC comes with increased visibility in the search results	It is a universally known fact that PPC listing’s visibility can be increased with maximizing the budget. However… With the “sponsored ad blindness”, many people do not even look at the ads. Their eyes naturally ignore the ads and scan through the organic listings. With the ad blindness, people not even see the ads. What good is the visibility of people don’t see them
You get the real analytics data	The point highlighted is that organic search keywords doesn’t show up in analytics if the searchers where logged in However… It is true that you cannot see the keywords for which the traffic came in from logged in Google users. However, if you are an expert in Google analytics, this is not a mystery. Read this article on how to identify the anonymous (not provided) organic search keywords reported by analytics.
The PPC world has less algorithm changes	PPC world certainly has no algorithm changes at all. However… The fact is, PPC should encounter trend changes and the changes in online search behavior of people. Algorithm changes never hurt organic SEO that sticks to the guidelines. So why worry?

Should I write another article that says “SEO beats the hell out of PPC?”

SEO Fight Now if I am starting to put up the advantages of SEO over PPC, the later doesn’t stand a chance. As said earlier, organic search results are always preferred by the people and for organic rankings, SEO is the only answer. The initial costs of SEO would be high considering the visitors that you obtain. However, after months of successful SEO, the returns in terms of visitors and organic rankings would keep on increasing and you can get into the SEO maintenance phase. At the maintenance phase, you can minimize the budget but the visitor count keeps climbing up. In case of PPC, you would hit an upper limit on the visitor count for a given budget. No matter how many months you use PPC, inorder to rise the visitor count, you have to rise your budget.

And the moment you stop PPC campaigns or minimize your budget, the traffic to your website from the campaign stops. In the case of organic SEO, once you have obtained good rankings, you can start minimizing the budget and go with minimal maintenance costs.

So, if I continue to list the advantages, I can write another full article on this. But that’s not the idea.

PPC feeds the website till SEO brings the ultimate food supply (That’s the right concept)

SEO traffic As you know achieving results on organic SEO is a long time process. Won’t your websites strive with hunger till SEO sends in unlimited and uninterrupted traffic to your website? This is where PPC helps. PPC can feed your website with bits and pieces of traffic (visitors) till SEO brings results in terms of organic search engine rankings.

Do you need PPC once you gain organic rankings for the target keywords?

Let’s take an example here. Someone searches for “buy shoes”. The first page #1 sponsored ad and the #5 organic listing are of the same website. According to statistics, the organic search in the #5th place still receives more clicks that the sponsored ad. So once your target keywords have achieved organic rankings, it’s time to take PPC out of the equation. Still you can use PPC for other keywords that aren’t organically ranked till the SEO result shows for them as well.

According to a trackback for a discussion on SEOm linkedin forum, “Best is to do both PPC and SEO. For my clients I usually recommend using PPC to get immediate customers and to test and optimize their funnel for conversion. While we are refining and optimizing their PPC campaigns, we are doing on-site SEO and link building to build organic SEO results for keywords that have proven to be profitable converting keywords in PPC.

The end goal is to have top rankings for organic while spending the maximum possible POSITIVE ROI PPC spend.

Since 75% of search engine visitors click organic search results and 25% clicks paid ads, you can't be getting maximum results from your digital marketing efforts if you don't capture both. And when you do get to be the #1 organic and the #1 paid spot on the same search results page, people click the organic result. So your ad gets shown for free, reinforces the message that you are the right answer to their search query, and pushes one more of your competitors off of the page.”

Do you know why SEO Vs PPC is a never ending debate? SEO and PPC are two entities that shouldn’t be compared but should go hand in hand!

Similar debate goes around with “Branding” Vs SEO. If you want to see the reality of this debate, check out this cool infographic on this.

Category :

SEO News

Tags :

SEO Vs PPC, SEO or PPC, PPC, SEO, Penguin update

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About Geno Thampi

Not a born Shakespeare! But I still write articles and blogs to share my ideas and thoughts on SEO and SMO. Being a part of SEO research team of SubmitINme, I keep my ears and eyes open, and the pen ready to grab, write and share trending topics in search engine .... more info