As I write this I’m sorta sick of this question. You see this on LinkedIn all the time. “What’s better?” Do you want to spend more money now to make more revenue? Or do you want to spend more money now to make more revenue in the future but ultimately cost you less? I know that sounds confusing so let’s unpack this thing and put it to bed right now. 

What Is PPC? 

Pretty simple honestly: it’s pay-per-click. So Facebook, Programmatic, Google, Nextdoor, Reddit. All those are examples of pay per click. Google and Facebook do about 98% of the PPC business. They are great ways to find a customer for your business right now. Which one you go with is it’s own blog but know that there’s advantages to PPC. 

Advantages to PPC

  1. You can find a customer today. Search takes time. It takes patience. If you have your site set up properly and your pixels are on the site you can start to find a customer within days if you have the right budget for your category. If you’re great at it (or hire an agency that’s great at it) you can potentially make a lot of money. 
  2. It’s easy to see return on investment. Again, search takes time so the $500 you spend on an article today might not pay off for 6 months. But the $500 you spend on acquiring customers today might net you $1000 in revenue today. Again, results vary but you can see pretty quickly and obviously if it’s working. 

Cons to PPC

  1. It’s expensive. If you have a niche and a tiny competitive set maybe you can find a cheaper way to get leads. But if you’re selling clothes or cosmetics..it’s gonna cost you big in all likelihood. 
  2. The right search strategy has a hire success rate than the right PPC strategy in my experience. You can do well on both but again, cost is such a factor that you can have a great target and lose. 

So what about SEO? 

Advantages to SEO: 

  1. You can create SEO for cheap. Let’s not confuse this: you shouldn’t have low quality content but you might find an in house writer who already gets paid and they can write for you on the side. You can find services that will give you bulk deals for articles. We do that for our clients. You can do it for a lot less than it’s gonna cost you to run PPC. 
  2. The long term benefits are great. I have a client who started with 0 search traffic. Now an article they wrote 4 years ago brings in $50,000 a year in revenue. The probably paid $750 for the article and it’s netted 200,000. You won’t see an ROI like that on PPC. 

Disadvantages to SEO: 

  1. It takes time. A great search strategy can take 3-12 months to see ANY signs of life and even longer to be thriving. 
  2. The more the better. You don’t want to put a ton of volume in for the sake of it but the more content you have earlier the better off you are. So you want to know your market, the competition and the right strategy. If you can do that you’ll be good to go. 

So what’s better? 

There’s not a “what’s better” but there is a good plan. My advice: If you need customers now go get them but carve out budget to spend on search. I have seen too many clients who wait and then wish they hadn’t. If you start search from Day 1 you’ll be better off for it in a year. 

If you need help and aren’t sure where to start, reach out. We can help.

Published by loupeandblade in Marketing