SEO or PPC

Hi, I apologise if my question has been asked a thousand times before or is a very difficult one to answer.

I have an e-commerce website and last year invested approx £3000 in PPC via adwords with good success. I am looking to go with SEO and am being quoted approx £500 per month for 6 months to achieve a top 5 ranking. So I am faced with an investment appraisal of which £3k will harvest the greatest rewards. I know many people seem to advocate a mixture of the 2 but that will take my spend to more than the £3k i have budgeted.

So is there a simple rule of thumb calculation that deomstrates the qty of clicks if ranked in the top 5 versus PPC if you were in the top 5 of the sponsored links?

Anybodys help on this issue will be hugely appreciated.

 

Hi,

I think you should hire any quality seo services provider for your site.

Coz if once you get good positions in SERPs then you can get more clicks than now.

Can use also PPC but organic traffics by natural way will give you more better response because all one know that with PPC you can get clicks but if you are also in good positions in SERP then visitor have also some satisfaction with your site quality.

If you will give us url then we can suggest you better.

Thanks
Thinkfast

 

I work as a freelance marketing consultant, and I have recently been reading up on SEO so that I can add it as another string to my bow. I read recently that investing in Google PPC will in turn help to increase your organic rankings.

Can anyone confirm on deny this?

 

Hi oscruft

Involvement in a Google ads/PPC campaign has no implications on organic search placement whatsoever, positive or negative. A common but incorrect myth.

Hi eco2g

Without knowing your site and field of operation, can only comment in general. Google ads bring business and can prove a profitable investment, the problem being they add little in the way of value beyond a visit from the click, only slightly higher conversion rates than organic search. You may draw customers that will come back and there is a nominal chance of recommendations but essentially, you are buying transient business.

By spending the money on SEO you are investing in your business, so if this brings a similar return, you win twice. Problem is the term "SEO" is much abused and there can be few areas so littered with outdated methods, little true knowledge, or downright falsehood.

As an example, the people you have approached who offered a top 5 slot in six months, don't go near them. The second anyone offering optimisation services makes a specific claim about where you will be listed, they are lying, or don't know what they are doing. They do not control Google, who make their own indexing decisions.

At best, they will persuade you to pursue uncompetitive keywords that will make them look good if you do happen to land on page one but not bring you any business. Many SEO companies also follow methods which can have short term success, until the reality is discovered by Google and you then end up in a worse position than when you started.

There are certain basic elements a good SEO will pursue:

Not make promises but simply achieve everything that can be achieved in a way that sits well with search engine guidelines and preserves the reputation of your business.

Explain everything they do at each stage. Above all this presents an opportunity to pass skills on, so you can take the site forward in the long term. Education and involvement of all staff is key to their role.

Present you with regular updates, including a real analysis of change in performance, whether good or bad. You of course need to match this with a financial analysis of the effect on income from the site.

At the end of the day, your decision is about ROI but important to realise there are no guarantees. You can not quantify what SEO will achieve in advance, so the latter part of your question has no definitive answer.

As a general picture, substantially more people use organic search than click on ads. This varies according to target market, product and country but as a very vague principle, 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 in favour of organic search, even allowing for slightly lower conversion.

So the benefit is there for the taking but the reality is competitive in almost any field. Not least because most people seem unable to go beyond page one, which harvests about 85% of all organic search, with a substantial number not going beyond the top three or four.

For all that, investing in making your website a success, rather than a lifetime of paying for ads is in most cases a good investment. You will need to be patient and accept that achieving your goal may involve your own staff, possibly changes to your overall marketing program.

In selecting someone to help, pick someone you trust and make sure you are well armed to ask the right questions. That may mean spending a while learning all you can about relevant topics, in particular the best ways to work with Google organic search.

Good luck whatever decision you made.

 

Dear eco2g,

SurreyWeb has given some excellent advice from my own experience.

Assuming your website is already SEO-friendly in terms of titles, bold tags for keywords etc, then you can do a great deal yourself to boost your rankings.

For example, is your site listed on all the various directories/supplier sites; is it mentioned in popular blogs etc.

Google general ranks on popularity i.e. external links IN to your site.

I would think it's a good idea to find out EXACTLY what tasks this SEO company are planning to do rather than give you a headline result i.e. top 5 in 6 months - that's just ad splurge.

Wish you well with it.
John

 

Using SEO techniques you can give your site the authority it needs to achieve good ROI, all within your budget, to optimize your site. Calculating a cost would depend on keyword competition. The more competitive the more its going to cost.

 

Search Engine Optimization Services

PPC marketing has various flaws. Take for example if you are providing services in UK and some SEO from USA search for "UK Marketing Company", then your website will be shown on the paid listing in USA.

Google does not consider the fact that your have mentioned UK as your targeted geographic location. Moreover, you can never track whether someone who clicked your ad was a genuine person or just a competitor exhausting your budget. :eek2

 

Benefits Of PPC
In most cases the website does not need to be changed at all.
It is very quick, you can often start seeing results within hours of activating a campaign.
You only pay when your advert is clicked.
You can pick which keywords to bid on.
The results can be tracked allowing continual improvements.
You can choose the page that users are sent to.
It is possible to target specific countries and regions.
You can rank highly for any keyword if your budget is large enough.
PPC can be a very effective way to promote a website. However the main drawback is that once you stop spending your adverts stop showing, there is no long term return for the expense. If you are currently running a PPC campaign why not try our pay-per-click review to see if we can increase your click through rate (CTR) and return on investment (ROI).

Benefits Of SEO
Visitors from search engine results do not cost you a penny.
The rankings a website achieves through SEO can continue for a long time after the work has been done.
Over the long term SEO can be more cost effective than PPC.
Visitors are more likely to trust a site they find in the rankings, they feel it has been 'approved' by the search engine.
The main problem with attracting visitors to a site using SEO is the time it takes to achieve results. You can expect to wait at least a month, and sometimes longer, before you see any real increase in traffic. However, an effective Internet marketing strategy will ensure that traffic increases, and as quickly as is possible.

 

Hi eco2g

I am new to all this and here learning about SEO and PPC myself, but what SurreyWeb says makes a lot of sense to me, especially where he says:

“By spending the money on SEO you are investing in your business, so if this brings a similar return, you win twice. Problem is the term "SEO" is much abused and there can be few areas so littered with outdated methods, little true knowledge, or downright falsehood.

As an example, the people you have approached who offered a top 5 slot in six months, don't go near them. The second anyone offering optimisation services makes a specific claim about where you will be listed, they are lying, or don't know what they are doing. They do not control Google, who make their own indexing decisions.”

 

I’ve gone through the discussions, very useful information. Newbie’s make a note.

 

I think a combination of both would be more useful.

 

Looking at the latest figures for the percentage of search users who click on ads, they have to taken seriously. Down to about 1 in 5 who regularly use ads to any extent and about 6% of users accounting for 50% of clicks.

With approaching a billion users, still not bad for Google, wouldn't mind 140 million people clicking on ads I owned but there's still little doubt that we will soon see radical changes in how search operates. They will want to get the numbers up.

From the business owner's perspective, in most sectors PPC is becoming less and less of a viable alternative.

 

hi if you have a good budget and you want to get quick result then go for Ppc .but according to my experience seo is like long term investment which gives good benefits at the end

 

PPC allows us to target specific markets. Campaigns like this generate a very high response since Internet users can follow a link directly to your company’s website.

 

Quite right Alfred but the main search results allow people to click through to your site as well. Anyway, good to hear you were pleased with your PPC campaign and you have revived the topic.

I should have done that, happened to see an article roughly on PPC v SEO a few days ago on one of our wonderful quangos. A little unkind, have run across one or two of the web developers there and they seem to know what they are doing.

Their article on website campaigns seems reasonably balanced and worth throwing into the mix. I'm still unshakeable in relying on organic search as a true investment but always worth seeing other views.

 

I got very useful information from the above discussion and also it helped me a lot.

SEO strategies are common techniques which are used to optimize the web site, to be Search engine friendly and enhance the chances of placing top in search engines. Although SEO can also be the most profitable techniques of driving links to the website because any links you receive from SEO are free links.

 

I designed a brchure for a SEO company in London which has some good advice and case studies, I can forward it on if needed

 

There are loads of search engines offering PPC advertising, not just Google. PPC is not really SEO, it's just advertising your website through a search engine for an advertising fee.
SEO is exactly that, optimising you site so the search engines will rank you higher in the SE search results page, for free. The more popular your keyword the harder (or longer it takes) to get to the top spot and stay there. You can get to the top spot really easy in PPC but it will cost you more in advertising fees.

 

see if you have enough funds and you had already got good rank in SERP then I suggest you to go for PPC it will increase the traffic and generate business for you which must be your ultimate goal...

 

Seo is the best .

Seo is the best if you are looking for a long term benefit out of a web site . PPC can give you quick results no doubts however seo improves the organic of the site .

Not many people prefer clicking on sponsored links because they do not get what they were initially looking for out of them . I would say spend some money and hire a seo professional .