Organic SEO reduces PPC costs and delivers longterm results
Focus on long-term, sustainable rankings
The online marketing industry is huge, estimated at $9 billion last year and projected to exceed $20 billion by 2013. That’s a figure that any business owner should pay attention to. The majority of this advertising is spent on PPC – pay per click advertising. Businesses have been able to buy traffic, using certain keywords and bidding on them according to how likely they were to bring in quality traffic that converts into sales or leads.
That's all well and good, however the real focus should be on generating sustainable organic rankings for those keywords instead of constantly bidding on them. Only 11% of advertising budgets go to SEO, while 87% direct their efforts in PPC. Think about it - if you spend $10 on a keyword and get one hundred visits in a month, that's $1000 that you allocated. If you put the same amount into SEO for that keyword, and brought your rankings to the front page of Google, you'd receive the same exposure. Plus, once you're on page one of Google, you can usually stay there with minimal effort and no further investment.
Alternatively, you can continue flowing money into PPC, but it will be a never-ending effort. PPC remains attractive to marketers because of the ability to easily measure PPC success. Traditional marketers like to see solid metrics on ROI, CTR and other relevant data they can use to analyze campaigns. SEO is not as easily quantifiable, but nonetheless a good SEO campaign can be measured and weighed effectively.
Several studies on visitor trends and SERPs indicate that 90% of searches click on the first page of results. The visibility of a natural listing, although possibly lower on the page, still attracts twice as many clicks than paid ones. Why is this? I side on the reason that it's because of implied endorsement; they trust search engines to deliver the best results, and many people see paid search results as artificial advertising.
The bottom line is that if you want to save money on PPC, you should invest in SEO. Organic search results bring a steady flow of traffic, just the same as paid ones, if not more. Plus, once you have a solid ranking for a keyword you previously bid on, you can lower your bid amount and focus on testing new PPC advertisements.
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