Comments on: Organics versus PPC

By: The Forgotten Art of Holding Hands… | QLOG

The Forgotten Art of Holding Hands… | QLOG — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:23:03 +0000

[...] working for them. Now Social Media is hot and PPC is not, right? Wrong. PPC still works and organics, if you build your program properly, still works even [...]

By: Michael Briggs

Michael Briggs — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:23:25 +0000

I agree with everything, and would add;

Something like 80% of all searches are done for information seeking only, no intent to complete a transcaction. I would sure hate to rely on PPC for those terms as the return on investment would simply not be there. Best to use organic efforts on these low converting, high in the conversion funnel terms. Then use both Organic and Paid Search for the rest.

By: Kim Painley

Kim Painley — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:21:02 +0000

The nails in your vicinity must all have headaches, Amy…you just hit another one on the head.

Not only does good SEO bring high quality, (practically) free traffic and conversions, it is also becoming a more and more important part of a healthy PPC program. Let’s face it, Google is King, and you could pay through the nose if Google doesn’t like your PPC landing page. And how does Google determine if a landing page is “good”? They use a version of their organic spiders to evaluate the text on the page and in the tags. The keywords you are bidding on – or words that are very closely related – better be there. The penalty could be small or huge depending on how competitive the terms are, but who needs a penalty, period?

Although bid and click-through-rate are still the primary drivers behind PPC page placement (last time I checked Google was still in the business of making money), page relevance can make a difference…not only in terms of what you pay per click, but also in conversions.

My final thought on SEO…at least for the moment…

Search engine spiders can not read all that lovely, fancy-font text that is embedded in images! If you have image-embedded text, repeat the text in your alt tags.

By: tom funk

tom funk — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:46:42 +0000

I am with you, on this, Amy! For a couple reasons:
1) PPC vs. SEO is not an either-or. As long as you are making money on it, you should do both. It’s the flipside of someone who asks, “I rank number one for my term organically, why should I pay for it too?” The answer: about 20% of clicks will go to the ads instead of organic results. If you’re getting ROI from a paid ad, keep it up, regardless of your SEO position.
2) There are low-converting terms you’d never make work in PPC, that make you plenty of money organically. We have a client who ranks well organically for “woodworking tools” and gets significant revenue from it. Every time we’ve tried the same term in the PPC program, we get our heads handed to us — insufficient ROI. Same is true for all those long-tail terms that good SEO brings to the surface. The low individual volume often wouldn’t pay to create even generic ads for these terms, but in SEO it’s all good.