Don’t Underestimate The Value Of Paid Search
We have a lot of potential clients come to us and think of SEO as some kind of magic potion that will magically transform their business overnight. The truth is that SEO should just be one tool in your marketing strategy and it should complement the rest of your advertising initiatives. One advertising initiative that we recommend that all of our clients engage in is paid search (also called “pay per click” or PPC advertising). The main difference between paid search and SEO is that with paid search you pay each time someone clicks through to your site, whereas with SEO clicks are free.
We find that many of our clients come to us with a negative bias toward PPC. Often they have tried PPC in the past and it wasn’t as successful as they would like it to be… or they don’t think it will work for them or just aren’t very interested in it for one reason or another. “SEO” seems to be the big buzzword these days and many people think of it as the very “sexy” (for lack of a better word) option. Far fewer jump up and down for PPC.
We believe that this line of thinking is flawed and know that PPC can (and should) be extremely effective. We have seen our clients perform spectacularly well with PPC time and time again. This is not to minimize the effectiveness or importance of SEO in any way – it’s certainly crucial to invest in SEO – however, PPC does have some very real advantages:
Immediate results – We always tell our clients to plan on giving us about six months before they really see a large impact. Sometimes we are very successful in just two or three months… and sometimes it can even take much longer than six. The fact is that with SEO it takes a long time for all of the links we build to get indexed and pass much credit to your website. With PPC, you can start showing up at the top of the search results and gain clicks and calls from day one. That is an enormous advantage.
More control – We do, as an SEO company, have some control over what terms you show up for and where you show up for those terms; however, one has much greater control with PPC. You can control exactly what keywords you want to show up for and where. You can cover multiple cities extremely effectively. We have noticed that with Google our clients will often dominate one city (usually the city that their office is located in) and not do quite as well with other cities that they want to target, as Google seems to tend to associate a website with one “primary” city. For example, we might have a client based out of Plano that also wants to show up for Dallas, McKinney and Frisco. We often find that the client dominates Plano and has weaker rankings in the other three. Google does not seem to process the website to be quite as relevant for the other three cities. With PPC, it’s super easy to show up for as many cities as you want to… another huge advantage.
Safer in the long run – Google made over $50 billion dollars in revenue last year. You can be sure that Google will want to increase that number year after year. Guess what… Google does not make a dime off of SEO. They make a ton of money off of PPC though. With all of Google’s algorithm updates, SEO is already getting more and more difficult to successfully implement and accomplish. Even though we are an SEO company, we have to be humble enough to admit that it’s at least possible that there will come a day in which cost effective SEO won’t be feasible. Google will always allow you to buy clicks from them; that’s how they became a $50 billion company.
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About SEO Team:
SEO Team is a Dallas SEO company that does online marketing for Texas small businesses. We specialize in SEO, PPC and social media. Get in touch today for a completely free quote.
