Why SEO (long term) > PPC (short Term)

This is a long Post but I will appreciate if you spend 10 minutes reading it and comment on what you think.

Yesterday I was looking to explore yahoo PPC marketing and was setting my campaign to promote nBridges Media and My SEO Services. And to my surprise Yahoo was predicting only 5 clicks/day for a budget of $100 for my SEO related keywords. Now I know that SEO is a highly completive keyword and I was geotargeting US/Canada market only but still this is ridiculous. I could have spent 20 more minutes to come up with better keywords, which I eventually did, to reduce the price per click to $2 but still, this is not cheap by any means considering the kind of “product” people like me are selling.

I am not an expert in PPC but I am not naive either and know the business of PPC enough to easily calculate that for a very targeted keyword in SEO Niche, I have to pay atleast $5/click i.e. $100 for 20 clicks. Now the problem is that even though my ads are only being shown in USA, I can easily imagine the quality of visitors won’t be that good. The chances are, I may get 1 sale after 200 clicks i.e. after burning $1000 which is probably not the best way of getting traffic, leads and sales. I am sure that I will have poor conversion because I like to work on site for 3 months period atleast which often turns off people but I like it this way as it gives me opportunity and time to show results, I anyway take payment in installments.

So Why I am writing this Post ?

With the above example, I am just trying to highlight how PPC market is over inflated with PPC companies so happy to make huge holes in your pockets. I mean why don’t yahoo automatically suggest me keywords which are cheap (with a message that it may bring less quailty traffic). Obviously this is not in their business interest so its users job to find the best keywords and still keep on paying huge sums. Since I had started as a webmaster, I also know the kind of people involved and the kind of sites people are running, making me less comfortable with this whole PPC Saga.

So why People still choses PPC to advertise when the easier option is to go for buying advertisement space on a big marketing blog ? well may be because people are too shortsighted and because they don’t realize the reality until they burn few thousand dollars.

The more I understand the Business on the Web, the more I feels the importance of making right choices as one wrong choice can put you in huge debt and a failed business!

So for those who are in my position, are vulnerable to click fraud and are thinking in long term, the good way is to work on getting organic traffic and to build a brand. It can take may be one year but it will eventually help in longer run. Also the money saved can be used to create more value for search engine visitors and your clients, effectively building a bigger and better asset.

PPC is good if you know how to use it properly which most of the mid-size business owners don’t (neither they have time to learn it since they have better things to do, which makes perfect sense since most often they are running the business alone). If you are not sure how PPC works (finding cheap keywords and monetizing/tuning campaigns), the better thing is Make a long term plan and look for organic traffic as well as to build a brand for repeat customers.

Cheers and have a Nice day
Pushkar Gaikwad

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