SEO: The Peanut Butter Cup Principle - Where’s the Love for SEO in a PPC World?
|
Written By Noah Mallin | October 22, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Rand Fishkin asks the question today: “Why does paid search earn so many more marketing dollars (than SEO?)” It’s an excellent question and one that sparked some good back and forth on the ol’ Twitter stream as well.
Rand sets us up by pointing out the disparity in spending: $9.1 billion on paid search versus $1.3 billion on SEO. As many of us already know the bulk of click-throughs online comes from organic (left side of the page results) traffic rather than paid (right side of the page results).
So what’s the deal?
Partly this has to do with the inherent strengths of paid search. With paid search (or PPC more specifically) every action can be directly correlated from the effect of your ad copy down to whether a purchase is made on your website as a result of your campaign. It’s easy to figure out where your click throughs are coming from, who your audience is, and how effective your strategy is.
With paid search the impact is almost immediate, unlike SEO which takes some time to work. Who doesn’t like immediate results?
Paid search requires fewer hands on deck from other parts of a client’s organization. SEO can mean signoffs from people responsible for IT, web design, editorial in the case of publishers, and site usability.
So is paid search better? No, it’s just different.
The strength of SEO starts with the aforementioned click through data. More people click on the left-hand listings – it’s a fact. The listings there feel more “neutral” and less like marketing to most users.
As I’ve pointed out before, SEO effects are measurable, just in a different way than PPC is. You may not be able to reach the same level of granularity as PPC but its not accurate to say that there is no way to account for the success of an SEO campaign.
Though SEO can require more input and action from a client’s different business units it can also in turn enhance their effectiveness, particularly site usability. Often the same steps that allow search engine bots and crawlers to recognize different parts of a site and to index them properly have the same clarifying affect for human users.
Finally, SEO’s effects aren’t immediate but they are long-lived.
Obviously the ultimate step to take here is to integrate both approaches into your marketing for what I call the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Principle. Adding the delicious chocolate of paid search to the yummy peanut buttery goodness of SEO yields exponentially greater results. Owning real estate on both sides of the results page increases the likelihood of click throughs and enhances the authority of both the paid and organic listings.
Topics: SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Search: How-To, Twitter |
Thanks for the knowledge. I would prefer PPC though
I have been a regular reader of your blogs. I must say your blog is very informative and classy.