Why small businesses should invest in SEO before diving into PPC

Why small businesses should invest in SEO before diving into PPC

Whenever I'm talking with a client, they will always ask if they should invest in SEO or PPC first.  I usually tell them to invest in both if they can, if not, start with SEO because it can bring in far more clicks overtime for a cheaper investment.  Running a PPC campaign can bring in a lot of traffic, but you can blow through your budget rather quickly, and there's no guarantee that your campaign is going to be successful on your first try.

Pay Per Click marketing is a powerful way to pull in traffic, but it doesn't compare to SEO, because a strong SEO campaign can bring in traffic from dozens of keywords and you don't have to pay for a single click!  There are going to be plenty of people that fight about this, clients and specialists, but in the end, there's no way for PPC to top SEO if they're both being done flawlessly.


SEO tends to be cheaper overall
When starting an SEO campaign, you'll realize your ROI isn't that great, but over time your net profit gets bigger and bigger.  Eventually, you'll realize that investing in SEO by targeting dozens of difficult keywords can bring in 10x the traffic than what you could afford running the best PPC campaign possible.

In the beginning, SEO isn't that powerful because it takes some time to mature, but you should power through those times since there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

PPC traffic will stop when your campaigns end
Running a PPC campaign will bring in immediate traffic, but that traffic will stop once you aren't paying for it, and that's one of the main reasons SEO is a better option.  When running an SEO campaign, you could get top rankings and stick there for one month, three months, or even a year with no other actions needed.  Of course, SEO is an ongoing task that needs to be worked on to stay ahead of your competitors.

PPC traffic is great, but it's artificial rankings that go away when the money stops powering the campaign.  SEO is great and will stick you at the top of the rankings if you were to stop for a month or two.  Of course, this also depends on the keywords you're targeting and how many agencies are going after top rankings for the same phrases.  The more competition there is, the more SEO that needs to be done, and the less downtime you'll get if you want to stick to that top spot.

Repetitive clicks don't cost you anything with SEO
When running an SEO campaign, you could have 1,000 clicks on your ads but have 500 unique clicks.  This means you paid twice for someone to get to your website.  With SEO, on the other hand, you don't pay when someone clicks through to your website.  You could pay an SEO agency $1,000 a month and get 100,000 unique clicks, and it wouldn't cost you a penny more than the agreed-upon price.


Less competition overall
If you were to compare the two traffic methods, PPC vs. SEO, there is a large user base that pays for traffic through Adwords and Bing Ads compared to the number of companies that are paying for SEO.  This is because companies like to handle a lot of their traffic generation methods, but they can't always do their SEO, so they pay for clicks.  This means you'll see more competition when running PPC campaigns and not as much when running an SEO campaign.

The majority of businesses out there don't even know what SEO does and why they need it.  This is another reason that proves there's less SEO competition compared to PPC competition


Final thoughts
If you're starting a website right now, invest in SEO, but don't go too crazy.  Build it up over time and watch your rankings climb the ladder to page one of Google.  You'll have a better sense of accomplishment when you hit #1 after a few weeks or months of work building links and creating content compared to paying for a top placement through PPC.  SEO can be much cheaper since you can do it on your own or outsource it to someone to build some high quality backlinks and see where your rankings land.  PPC campaigns cost you a decent amount if you're in a competitive industry, and that means you could go broke quickly if your campaign isn't optimized.  I'm sure there will be some people that argue about this discussion, but in the end, SEO continuously sends in traffic months after your actions stop but PPC stops immediatly after you stop funding the campaign.

Thanks for reading

- Tommy
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey