To add balance to Eleni’s argument that Google Adwords is better than SEO, I thought it pertinent to publish a retort from an SEO’s perspective. Read this and the opposing article and make up your own mind as to which argument you think is most valid.

Reason 1 - In Most Cases PPC Burns Money

There’s no denying that most PPC Adwords campaigns created by business owners are left to run wild without the daily management needed to make them cost effective. This costs businesses an obscene amount of money as these un-managed campaigns burn cash at off-peak times on keywords that don’t convert or worse to landing pages that don’t exist.

SEO on the other hand cannot be left running on auto-pilot. As a result more care and attention is paid to optimisation and link building activities which in the long run is more cost effective.

Reason 2 – PPC Costs Can Only Go Up

As the market becomes ever more competitive and as Google seek to integrate a paid advertising model into an increasing number of new channels, the costs attributed to PPC are set to increase exponentially as more competitors drive up the cost per click.

SEO services don’t work on the same business model. SEO is a great playing field leveller with small online retailers able to compete with bigger brands by being more agile and having a smarter SEO strategy.

Reason 3 – SEO Continues To Work Even Without Administration

If you turn off an Adwords campaign your traffic will cease. What’s more, the longer you leave it the more risk you have of your quality score dropping and when reactivated your CPC may have increased.

As Google etc are always playing catch up with an SEO’s link building and on-site optimisation implementation, pausing SEO activity for a week or so will not damage your search position.

Reason 4 – Adwords is Limited to Google (‘s network)

In order to have the maximum amount of exposure across all search engines you will need to dounble or triple your PPC budget and have accounts on Bing and Yahoo in addition to Google.

SEO generally works across all search engines and if done correctly, a targeted link building campaign will see rankings improved across every search engine.

Reason 5 – PPC Only Gets 20% of Search Traffic

According to Google, across all searches only 20% of people click a paid advert in the search results. This means that even at maximum spend, PPC traffic is only bringing 20% of potential customers to a website.

SEO’s organic and Places listings cater for the remaining 80% of clicks making SEO a far more cost effective long term solution to lead generation.

Posted In:

PPC - Google Adwords, SEO Tips