Search Advisory

I’ve been asked to participate in what should be a lively session at the Online Marketing Summit in my hometown of San Diego next month.  “PPC vs. SEO: The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle” will feature my fellow panelists and I duking it out about which SEM tactic is best, Pay-Per-Click advertising or Search Engine Optimization.  My friends at OMS have not yet told me which side of the warfield I’ll be on…but I’m ready to take out some teeth either way!

I can play on the Pay-Per-Click team, if they’d like.  After all, PPC typically allows marketers to cast a wider net than does SEO.  That is to say, with SEO, you’re limited as to the number of keywords you can target by how many web pages you have to optimize.  For example, if you’ve got a 50 page website, and assuming you optimize each page for two keywords, you can only target 100 keywords with SEO.  But there are no such limits on PPC advertising.  If you’ve got the bandwidth and budget, you can target hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of keywords via PPC.

Pay-Per-Click is also more immediate.  Hopefully you’ll do some research, planning and copywriting in advance, but once you sit down to launch a new account, it can literally just take minutes until your PPC campaign is up and running, driving traffic to your site.  With SEO, even after making changes to your site to optimize it (which can take time, depending on your web developer’s queue), there’s typically a wait until you can achieve prominent placement in the search engines’ results.  If you’ve got a new site and/or are in a competitive industry, it can take months or even years, and lots of link-building work, to see results.

You control the copy in the title and description with PPC, so you can make it as compelling as possible to the searcher.  Similarly, you control the landing page, so you can use all the usability and testing techniques available to boost conversions as high as you can.  With SEO, you can control the listing’s copy and landing page to a certain extent, but search engines have been known to display quirky titles and descriptions, and even rank pages high that you’d rather they didn’t.

That being said, if the OMS team asks me to fight on the Search Engine Optimization squad, I can certainly do that as well.  For one thing, a number of studies have shown that 70-80% of searchers will click on the organic listings rather than the paid listings.  Who wouldn’t want to be found where the majority of one’s target audience is looking?

Relatedly, many searchers feel that the organic listings are more trustworthy than the ads, since presumably a third party (the search engine) is deciding who ranks high – this isn’t something that can be bought.  (Well, not directly anyway!)  There is a real branding effect here – consumers often assume that the highest ranking sites are the industry leaders (whether that’s actually true or not).

Finally…can you say FREE?!?  Not having to pay the search engines per click (and pay more over time as competitors enter the field and raise bids) has a huge effect on your cost per conversion, ROI, and marketing budget as a whole.  Of course, optimizing your site and attaining high rankings isn’t really free, as you’ll have to pay someone (in-house or third party) to do the work, build links, and stay on top of everything.  But you don’t have the additional, out of pocket, line item cost of paying for each click too.  And there’s no worry about click fraud with SEO – unqualified visitors don’t cost you money.

Of course, in this search marketing smackdown, the role I’d really like to play is that of peacemaker.  Can’t we all just get along?  Because the ideal is, of course, to use both PPC and SEO.  Rather than fishing where 70-80% of the fish are, it’s even better to fish where 100% of the fish are.  I like to be greedy when it comes to the search engine results pages, and take up as much real estate as possible.  This means one PPC ad plus one or two organic listings for our clients for targeted keywords.  (Ideally, it means attaining even more organic listings for them via other sites, such as their blog, optimized press releases, social media profiles, directory listings, and more.)

Studies have shown that when searchers see the same company listed in both the paid and organic listings, not only are they more than twice as likely to click, but they’re also more than twice as likely to convert on the back end.  Presumably this is due to the increased credibility that this perceived industry leader has due to their dominance in the search engine results.  The traditional media folks have always preached the value of frequency, and search marketers can attain frequency by having listings appear for a variety of keywords, both in the organic and paid listings.

Join us on Thursday, February 25 for OMS’ Day 3, put on in conjunction with the good folks at Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch.  I’m looking forward to appearing on a panel with brilliant and experienced speakers such as Andrew Goodman, Matt Bailey, Richard Zwicky, and moderator Brian Lewis.  Come to sunny San Diego next month and see who comes out with the fewest bruises!