SEO and PPC are both excellent choices for Internet marketing, and they also work very well in tandem. Nevertheless, running both SEO and PPC campaigns isn’t always practical. In some cases, issues specific to your business make PPC a much better choice for lead generation and/or revenue generation. Here are seven telltale signs PPC is the right choice for you.
- 1. Your business is seasonal. SEO requires steady effort year after year, and your organic visibility can’t be turned on and off. With PPC, you can invest heavily in advertising during busy seasons, and scale back or shut down completely when business is slow. 2. Big companies dominate SEO. In some niches, a handful of mega-corporations with six- or even seven-figure SEO budgets price all the smaller companies out of the market. An SEO campaign to get you from page 10 to page 8 on Google probably won’t yield much, if any, ROI; whereas with PPC, you can appear prominently on Google right away. 3. Your business model will change. If your business is likely to change due to an aggressive acquisition strategy, product development or a similar reason, PPC enables you to adjust or overhaul ad content, offers and landing pages quickly. SEO, on the other hand, requires months of work to optimize for new keywords, and may not be fast enough to keep up with you. 4. Your specialized business has low keyword volume. Companies in highly specialized businesses get lazy sometimes because there is little competition for organic keywords, and they show up in organic results with minimal effort. However, if such a company ran a PPC campaign with knockout offers, it may catch the competition off guard and generate lots of leads and orders. 5. You have a knockout offer. If your business runs on terrific offers — lifetime guarantees, massive discounts/sales, etc. — PPC ads will convey your value proposition with far more impact than an SEO campaign that may or may not explain your offer in the organic link that displays on Google. 6. You want instant gratification. SEO takes time to bear fruit, and many organizations are hungry for immediate results. If you are looking for a fast (and perhaps more precisely measurable) return on investment, PPC is the way to go. 7. You have a local business serving a local market. Local SEO is a popular and effective approach, but it does require time, quite a bit of effort, and a great deal of expertise. Many, if not most, local businesses serving local markets have found PPC to be easier to implement and highly effective.
Needless to say, before diving into PPC, SEO or both, it makes sense to take a careful look at all the variables. If you’re not sure which option is best for you, please contact us. We analyze PPC versus SEO situations multiple times, every day.