Don't be afraid. It's only SEO.

SEO vs PPC: Why you're wasting money

In 2008, $12 billion was spent on PayPerClick advertising compared to $1.4 billion spent on SEO. People still don’t understand SEO. Adwords, on the other hand, is very easy to understand. If someone clicks a banner to visit your site, you have to pay a fee but you know that someone has seen your message. You know what you get and you know what you pay for. It’s like paying the guy who mows your lawn. It is very easy to see the work he did. He spends 2 hours, you can see the guy working through your kitchen window, and you pay him for the work afterwards for doing a good job.

SEO is very different. It's more like hiring an electrician to fix a problem. You know something isn't working right, you can't figure out what, and you have to take their word that everything is wired correctly. An SEO expert can help you optimize your site for Google and just like an electrician, you hand him a pile of money and he will do "something" with your site. He disappears and returns saying everything is fixed. He’s added some “inlinks”, changed some “on page keywords” and updates your “meta tags.” He tells you that everything is fixed and you’ll get great results from organic Google searches. Outwardly, you can’t tell anything has changed.

This is the problem of the SEO expert. It's difficult to explain what needs to be done in a simple manner without sounding like you’re speaking a foreign language, and it can take a lot of time to do SEO correctly, which means it often costs more. After they have finished optimizing a site, the results aren’t instantaneous. They can’t prove that their work had any effect on Google in an immediate fashion, so people prefer using Adwords. SEO isn’t a one time fix. It’s a long process of sitting and waiting. Over the course of three to six months, you’ll see the return on your investment with a stronger return on organic research for your entire site (not just one page) and more traffic to your website.

Done correctly, SEO can have a huge impact on your website and on your entire business. For example, by taking just one relevant keyword on a website and optimizing the site for it, it’s possible to advance from the 19th search result on Google to first or second place. For a keyword with 10,000 monthly searches, it means you will get about 2,000 visitors instead of 10.

Roughly 89% of search engine marketing is spent on PayPerClick advertising. In 2008, $11.9 billion was spent on PPC ads compared to $1.4 billion that was spent on Search Engine Optimization. When you look at the reach that PPC has compared to SEO, the results are the complete opposite; 90% of the people that do a search click on a link compared to only 10% that click on the paid ad. 

Considering 90% of Google users find websites through the organic search, proper SEO makes it possible for them to find your site over and over again long after the Adwords campaign has ended and brings in the people that don’t trust paid search results. So why are we spending 90% of our online marketing budgets to attract the 10% of online traffic generated by search engines?

Why settle for just a small piece of the pie when you can have 100% of it using Google's organic search? Start focusing more on SEO, either by hiring someone to help you out or by learning about it yourself. 

Comments

[Shahab Zargari]

Really great post Duffy! Saw it on twitter, retweeted it, shared it on linkedin and facebook and then posted a blog about it here:
http://www.smallbusinessmarketingandadvertisinghelp.com/blog/2010/03/08/a-fantastic-blog-on-search-engine-optimization-everyone-should-read/

Keep up the great work!

(@assuranceagency)

[The Duffy Agency]

Glad you found our post useful Shahab! We'll do our best to keep it up.

// Jason

[Web search optimization]

Great post thanks. We've referenced it on our SEO blog:

http://searchengineswebsite.com/seo-strategy-help/

[perpetual traffic formula]

Being a true advocate of SEO myself, I really liked your thoughts on the matter, as well as the diagram. For many it's just to expensive to dabble in PPC. So I say, thank god for SEO.

[Perpetual Traffic Bonus]

I am one of the guys that can't seem to keep up with the Google changes. I really feel like they are constantly changing their requirement for a quality score. Also, I cannot justify the "Crazy" prices for PPC these days for the Best Key Words. It, in my opinion has driven the small guy that is trying to make a Life online away from PPC and the constantly changing rules for getting placements without doing dirty tricks that will eventually catch up to you, away from the Organic side.
Many people try to do some SEO for their website but fail to get results, I know because I have been there. I appreciate you sharing this information.
Great piece of work! Very Informative.

[James the Marketing Consultant]

As a Internet Marketing Consultant, I agree with your graphs and your descriptive thoughts. SEO will be around for so long guiding every internet marketer and bloggers alike. great ranking on search engine means more possible traffic result.

[Merl licensed electrician]

As a business owner I am trying very hard to get traffic to my website. PPC has never been that helpful, but I am starting to see some (all be it few) results from SEO. But I agree, the changing parameters are difficult and it starts to NOT be cost effective to pay someone to keep track of it. Thoughts?

[Proofreading services]

I absolutely agree that SEO and organic ranking is much more important than PPC, simply because it's free. I have to admit though that, to date, 80% of my business has come through PPC campaigns. A lot of these customers have also provided me with repeat business so while the cost of acquisition was higher than I would have liked it to have been, the business that has result from PPC has been worth it in the long run.

[Mark Salmon]

90% of SEO is essentially very simple although it does take some work to get high quality back links. I agree that SEO seems to be a foreign language to most business owners and for that reason they are frightened to invest. Perhaps they are right to be cautious if don't fully understand what you are investing in. I am sure that some unscrupulous operators will take advantage of their ignorance.

[Adam Svar]

Great Analogies here guys. I love the way you compared seo to an electrician and ppc to a lawn mower. That's what it is there's a bit of science behind SEO as oppose to PPC. Which is simply that - Pay Per Click. I would say being proficient with SEO and engaging in that sort of optimization is crucial for the long-run. Finding ways of being efficient in PPc is also important as its alot faster to setup and attain some business or attention.
http://www.findmyelectrician.ca

[will]

What about ppc traffic?

[will]

ppc provides instant traffic, although its expensive. And seo takes longer but it only requires your time.

[Mr Sparky the NWA Electrician]

89% of SEM is spent on PPC? Wow! I knew that the organic results got way more traffic than PPC, but I had no idea so many people were trying to use PPC. That's amazing. I can see that though b/c pretty much everyone knows that there's so much traffic online, but very few know how to get there w/o paying.

[Electrician Toronto]

Hi thanks for sharing your thought about SEO. Nice comparison to an electrician though. Business owners badly needs SEO to generate more customers in online marketing.

[diy home solar panels]

SEO is badly needed but usually not so easy to do and most importantly it is very time consuming, if not outsourced properly. Therefore many start and soon end the process without gaining results. I would say stick with it longer and you will see results.

[super teas]

Why do they choose the PPC over the SEO? It is easy to understand SEO, when the time comes that everybody has a wild knowledge about it the PPC for sure will gently get down. Electrician is the perfect comparison of the SEO, in other terms like electrician. They come if there's a problem or for the maintenance.

[Jammie@SEO Expert]

I agree with you super teas, electrician is the right word for SEO. It’s like differentiating IT between Computer Science (programmer)... IT are like the driver on a taxi cab, they know how to use the things and have a little knowledge to fix the taxi, but compare to the programmer(software engineer) they are the one who really knows how to fix the cab and knows things beyond a driver can.