The debate rages onward! Who will win out? Will it be SEO or PPC?
Well let’s see… These 2 forms of marketing accomplish very different objectives.
With PPC or pay per click marketing that you can setup on Google, Bing, or even Facebook what you get is the ability to setup ads and begin driving traffic almost immediately. Sure you may have to wait a few days to get your ad approved by the “PPC Gods” who run the platforms, but as long as what you are selling is above board and honest, you should encounter little in the way of obstacles.
PPC requires a good copywriter. Not just any ad will convert… you will need to know how to write a compelling “story” in limited characters. This is a skill that has taken me years to “somewhat master”. But, once you have your ad in place, the results are easily tracked and measured using your favorite service providers metrics platform. If using Google, you would see your results in your Google Analytics or Adwords account.
Let’s look at SEO though…
SEO can give you everything that PPC can and more! Take a look at this heat map…
The click through hotspots are pretty easy to see, eh?
The “red stuff” is telling us where the activity is… Notice that its concentrated on the organic results and not the right hash where the PPC ads typically run.
This is the result of a common phenomenon called “banner blindness” or “ad blindness”. This occurs when your prospect is accustomed to seeing an area on the page that is consistently laden with ads, and thus begins to ignore them. The prospect assumes that there is no value in the ad itself and goes straight for the organic search results.
This heat map of clicks is telling us that the organic search results are the most preferable results on the page! (Look where the red stuff is located)
So how do you get the most preferable results to work for you? You begin an SEO campaign with an honest SEO provider. (More on that later)
With SEO, you get proper click tracking, you get a definite result in that you rank or you don’t, and you get the most desirable screen real estate in the eyes of your prospect.
But here’s the real kicker.
You also get MARKET SHARE!
Let me explain… At any given time there are only 10 spots on page 1 in Google. Every spot you occupy is a spot that your competition can NOT occupy! And, if you push them off page 1 to page 2 or 3, you can effectively ensure traffic for you niche will come to you. This is because very few people will go past page 1 when doing an organic keyword search!
Ideally, you want to rank for as many existing keyword niches as possible that relate to your niche. Emphasis on existing… Some dishonest service providers will rank you for keywords that actually have no search volume and then claim that they did what they said they would. Well, maybe they did… But SEO should come with traffic! Traffic that is related to your niche. If you rank for a term, yet your traffic does not change, then you probably have been sold a line of bull.
You can check up on niche based terms using the Google Keyword Tool External. I’m going to show you this tool in a coming post…
But in the meantime remember this:
SEO is a zero sum game… There are only 10 spots on page 1! Do you occupy one of them or not?