In the world of digital marketing, there are two big ways you can invest your hard-won silver: Pay-Per-Click and SEO.
This is all about traffic, folks. Getting more eyeballs on your website.
You have something to sell or a service to offer. You want to make sure you’re always growing.
While there are ultimately many different strategies you could adopt to get traffic to your site, the Big Two are PPC and SEO.
However, many businesses make the grave mistake of investing in SEO without paying attention to PPC. And I’m here to explain why that isn’t such a good idea and what you should do instead.
But first, a quick story.
One client of ours has a website in the legal niche.
On multiple occasions, this client has mentioned her “SEO company.”
Curious, one day I decided to run all the main searches her site is optimized for. These are the main content areas you can see when you visit her site.
Well, guess what?
Despite this client spending easily thousands of dollars on a reputable SEO company, I couldn’t find the website in any of the searches for the primary keywords this website was built out for.
In effect, this client was experiencing what I’ve seen time and again with various other clients – investment in SEO without seeing many obvious results.
SEO Takes Time
Now, it’s true that SEO does take time to work.
If you’re serious about SEO’ing your website, then you need to settle in for the long haul.
There is one thing, though, that I immediately look for whenever I see a client’s website who says they are “paying for SEO.”
How much new content is on the site? What type of content strategy is the SEO firm implementing?
Almost always, the answer to that is: zero. There is zero new content, and there is zero strategy in terms of content being run by the SEO firm.
Google loves websites that regularly update their content.
Rich readable content has an extremely high value on the web, but guess what? It’s also very hard to create. It takes time, it requires some research, and just one piece of content isn’t going to make a lick of difference. A good content strategy requires time and follow-through.
Most SEO companies are really running shady linking operations in the background of your site. They might advise you to create a few static pages targeting specific keywords. But overall, what they’re doing isn’t very effective.
Now imagine if you were paying an SEO firm, and they were doing some amount of work for you, and then after you’ve already dumped all that time and money into the SEO process you discover that the keyword you optimized for isn’t even a keyword that brings high quality customers into your business.
How frustrated would you feel?
This is why we always suggest our clients should use PPC to lead their SEO efforts.
Why PPC is the Perfect SEO Laboratory
SEO is a fuzzy pseudoscience.
Since Google’s algorithms are only known to Google’s own engineers, there is always a huge element of guessing involved in any SEO process.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results when Google is concerned, because Google can easily change how it weighs the various factors it puts together as a site’s ranking.
Given that fact that neither you nor I actually know how Google weighs sites or how they’re going to weigh sites in the future, SEO always involves measured guesses.
Some of these guesses are based on years of observation, such as the importance of quality links going into a site.
Other guesses are pure guesses with no real meat behind them.
Well, PPC is to the contrary an actual data-driven process where you can see all the numbers involved.
You set up your PPC correctly, and you can see how many people search for a given term in the geographic area you’ve specified. You see how well your ads perform. And you then optimize those ads and get at least an indirect sense of what your market responds to.
Finally and most importantly, by doing Pay-Per-Click properly and with an eye always on the numbers, you identify the keywords that are most profitable for you.
PPC lets you demystify at least the question of which keywords would be most impactful for you to optimize for via SEO.
For that reason (and the fact that SEO is inherently a fuzzy science as discussed above), we always advise clients to begin their digital marketing efforts with PPC prior to investing even a penny in SEO.