Does your website own traffic like this?
A frequent question I hear from small business owners is “Why should I be spending money on SEO and linkbuilding when I already pay for Google Ads?”
For a long time I answered with the typical descriptions of how SEO works and how the two differ from one another, until I finally came up with the following analogy:
Pay-Per-Click advertising is like renting your website traffic: The second you quit paying for it, you’re left empty-handed.
Organic rankings from SEO is like owning your website traffic: Even when you decide to hang up your SEO hat, you continue receiving the dividends of your past Search Engine Optimization efforts, often for many years.
They finally get it! This analogy helps small business owners understand that PPC and SEO are both great, but SEO is the real long term win for small businesses!
Now, don’t get me wrong – I absolutely recommend that all businesses test and utilize both forms of search marketing. PPC has huge benefits including instant traffic and results, granular targeting and analytics, and just like renting, it offers liquidity: you can stop buying a keyword instantly. That makes it a great way to test a keyword or niche before you invest more money into it.
But that said, SEO is a long-term investment in your business and your website. So, are you renting your website traffic, or are you building equity in your website traffic?
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s unfortunate there aren’t more benefits to PPC after it’s stopped, especially since you’ve paid so much to get the traffic.
However, this can be seen as a positive, since you can turn the traffic on or of based on needs and growth.
Using both SEO and PPC together can lead to great results and is highly encouraged.
Mike recently posted..7 Reasons Why PPC Doesn’t Work
My thinking on ways to keep the benefits of PPC rolling is to use paid traffic to build your free traffic by pushing them to Share, Tweet, Like, Reddit, Stumble, and link to your content.
Paid stumblers are a good example of paid traffic that will build into free traffic if your content is good enough. Whether you value StumbleUpon traffic is another question, but pageloads don’t cost much and they might tweet and like your content so worth testing.
Kane recently posted..Why Links Are Important for Small Businesses
Ideally you shouldn’t have to choose and do both, if PPC is giving a good ROI, it doesn’t really matter how you compare them. Also many “white hats” have been shafted by Google during big updates pushing their sites to page 2 or worse with no reason given, small businesses who are not authority sites are a lot more at risk of a big update not liking something about their site or incoming links.
PPC also has the advantage of being able to play around with more conversion focused landing pages and being able to instantly fix many issues like bad positioning and weak ad copy.
PPC is also great for working out which keywords convert, real traffic on keywords, which if you don’t have upfront you would have to thumb suck initially or rely on inaccurate tools.
All good points Franco. I think PPC is killer for (A) testing ideas and (B) businesses with solid marketing budgets. For lots of small businesses with a limited budget, I think they need to balance the two initially and find a happy medium while considering the long term benefits of having the option to not continue paying for PPC unless they want the extra traffic.
Kane recently posted..SEO vs PPC: Quit Renting Your Website Traffic and Start Owning It!
Paid traffic also has its place for highly competitive SEO keywords. It may be extremely difficult to rank for a certain keyword and after dumping $20,000 into SEO, still not be on the first page or getting serious traffic whereas $20k of paid advertising would pay for itself.
PPC and other paid traffic is still a similar marketing model to what existed in the past (print, radio, etc..). SEO is different because in some some low competition markets, you can “set it and forget it” while other markets, trying to maintain ranking is more expensive than just “renting.”
Blake Waddill recently posted..Clear 4g Wireless vs. Road Runner/Time Warner Cable Internet
That’s true – PPC has an instant payoff if your funnel is optimized – I can’t argue with that. I’d definitely agree that businesses need to use both to balance their traffic needs at any given time.
Kane recently posted..Why Links Are Important for Small Businesses