Hey, how’s it going?
The following ‘SEO VS PPC’ article is going to be something else, you might spend the whole day reading the blog and reconsider your advertising.
Are you like: “duh, of course SEO is cheaper”?
I understand why you might be thinking that, yet SEO has long been forgotten as a free marketing method.
What do I mean?
SEO means free organic traffic, right?
Organic it is, but It’s impossible to say it is free… at least not any more.
Why?
Reason one
The Internet is crowded, more people constantly put up blogs and try to rank as many pages as they could… and even though fresh blogs don’t have much chance, they are still competition.
They most likely won’t get to page one of Google (at least not fast, and not all of them), but they will still try to build links and optimize articles to get them as close as they can… and when there are millions, if not billions of blogs doing that (there also are powerful blogs like mine already on first page of Google), you kinda have to get ahead of the competition somehow… that happens by paying for tools and services to be able to not only build links and rank, but to maintain rankings.
Reason two
All those tools and services cost money… and if it was one time fees, SEO would be closer to free, but most of them are monthly fees (don’t tell me you hate that, you’d charge monthly if you had a crazy cool software, or maybe you do).
You will need at least 500 dollars monthly for optimization and this is only backlinks and “social love” money… if you want results that make a difference.
Yes, you can get backlinks for free, but calculate how long it will take you to outrank one of my first page articles that has a couple hundred thousand links to it.
Even low competitive keywords these days are not easy to go after.
Maybe in 1995 it was easy to rank all by getting a few backlinks, but now you need a lot of links… from all over (Social Media, directories and web pages and blogs, internal links etc), which takes us to:
Reason three
SEO takes a lot of time and hard work… and all those Google changes make it even more work, which takes more time.
Despite all those reasons, SEO is still the name of the game, but it costs a lot (both – time and money). And I didn’t even say anything about maintenance, because once you get to the first page, you have to stay there… and this is even more money and more time.
On the other hand, all you need to run PPC ads is a few hundred bucks… you don’t have to spend a month or two to rank a page, you don’t have to stay updated with all the changes Google makes to be able to avoid penalties…
…you need money, and a few minutes to choose the right paid marketing platform.
Leave me your thoughts and tell me what works best for you.
I personally do both (less SEO though) and PPC comes out more expensive, but the more I spend, the more I make and it’s really a matter of point of view.
SEO VS PPC is quite an interesting battle topic and to tell you the truth, I think the best option when starting out is PPC… and later on adding optimization to the table, once you write at least a few articles to be able to start building internal links first.
Time to check out the Full SEO Promotional Process, and find out about all those tools and services I just wrote about.
For SEO vs PPC part two click here… Awesome infographic included in the second part.
