SEO vs. PPC Marketing ROI

SEO or PPC: Quality matters

I recently heard a marketing professional say that his firm didn't focus on SEO since search engines only delivered about 5 percent of their traffic, and it made me wonder how long that person will keep their job. This was a young, tech-savvy marketer who was really into social media and spending gobs of money on PPC advertising. Don't get me wrong: Used properly, those tools can be great drivers of traffic, but they're not necessarily the best drivers of profit.

"Think about this," I said, "You're putting nothing into SEO, and it's driving five percent of your traffic." What I didn't say was, "Have you looked at the conversion ratios from SEO as opposed to other traffic sources? I would be willing to bet you have not." No need to be adversarial.

Even if search engines are not your biggest source of traffic, they are probably your best source of traffic.

The reason is obvious, isn't it? Search engines pull people to your site who are looking for what you offer. It's like having someone find you in the yellow pages. Something like 80 percent of people who are looking for a product or service start their search on the web. These people are very close to buying. If they don't find your business on the first page of search results, but they do find your competitors, you won't be in business for long. Not to scare you, but it really is that simple.

Another advantage of organic SEO (as opposed to paid-per-click advertising like Google AdWords) is that it delivers long-term benefits. Once you reach the top for your keywords, it can be pretty easy to stay there. I have pages that I haven't touched for years that still sit in the top five results for their keywords. If I get only three clicks a day on those pages, that's a thousand visitors a year. How much would 1,000 people looking for your product or service and finding your company be worth to your business every year? How about 10,000? Do that math.

Good SEO helps your brand, too. It speaks to your competence when your company pops up on top. Not only will more people find you, but the seeds of trust have been planted if they've found you that way. Put yourself in your prospective customer's shoes: Whom do you trust more, the company on top of organic results or the one with the paid ad? Which gives you a better sense of satisfaction, finding what you need in a search result or clicking on an ad?

There is also the money consideration. How much does SEO cost your company? You could hire someone to do it full-time at a fraction of the cost of an AdWords campaign. Unlike most of your employees, that person's performance would never be in doubt. Either you're on top for your keywords or you're not, right? The beauty is that you probably don't even need a full-time SEO person -- you can hire someone to do the initial work for a few thousand dollars and the maintenance work for a few hundred dollars a month. What had been five percent of your traffic grows to ten percent, and experience tells me that this will be your highest-converting traffic by far.

Here are how the numbers might look if we compare organic SEO vs. PPC. The assumptions are very conservative, though the numbers are smaller than they might be in real life.

As you can see, your accumulated clicks from your PPC campaign stop growing when the campaign stops, whereas your accumulated SEO clicks continue to grow. You might get more of an initial boost out of PPC, at least in clicks.

We get a big bump out of our PPC campaign, but it dies after the campaign ends.

The ROI on the SEO campaign is negative at first, but after three months it's pure gravy. As usual, PPC gives an initial bump (Frankly, a 100 percent ROI is insanely optimistic for a PPC campaign -- count on 20 percent if you're really good.)

These charts were drawn from this hypothetical data set. To be fair, you could continue your PPC campaign, spending $1000 a month on it, and your gross sales would be much higher. In fact, if you get a 100 percent ROI on your PPC campaign, you'd be stupid not to continue it. At any rate, you get a much better bang for your buck out of SEO, no matter how you slice it.

This blog post assumes a continuation of the PPC campaign. You might want to subscribe to this blog so that you don't miss all this great stuff.

Before you dump $10,000 into your next advertising campaign, consider spending a fraction of that on someone (ahem, like me) who will deliver results that will pay you for years.

Or if you want to do it yourself, try this. (affiliate link)

Either way, invest in SEO for the long-term health of your business. Slow and steady wins the race.