We’ve noticed that a lot of potential clients come to us who are spending a lot of money on PPC campagins—they pay for their website traffic by bidding on Google Adwords for each click. However, they don’t spend anything on increasing their organic SEO rankings, and in fact don’t have any organic SEO strategy whatsoever.
Why is this? Mostly they tell us that it’s because they don’t know where to begin with organic SEO, that it’s easier just to pay for traffic than build up organic search engine rankings over time.
PPC is great used as a quick-fix of immediate traffic, or as a top-up to other traffic generation methods. However, relying solely on PPC for traffic is a very short-sighted strategy.
Organic SEO is a far better long-term strategy than PPC.
1. Organic rankings provide long-term results
Sure, it may take a while to start to get decent organic rankings, and you may have to pay someone to work on an ongoing SEO campaign. However, once you have the results, you don’t need to keep paying for that traffic.
Organic rankings are consistent results that you can rely on. With PPC—you stop paying, the traffic stops.
Also, good organic rankings allow you to expand your marketing efforts into other areas—tackling more competitive, higher-traffic keywords, for example.
2. Organic results result in better quality leads
Studies show that traffic resulting from clicks on the natural search engine results are more likely to convert to sales than those resulting from clicks on ads.
Searchers are becoming increasingly more savvy, and are more likely to trust the organic results than adverts which have been paid for.
3. Organic results capture a greater share of available clicks
Test after test shows that many more people are likely to click on the organic search results, as opposed to the adverts. And just like the “ad banner blindness” issue, the same is happening to Adwords ads too.
We’ve heard many times suggested that, on average, 80% of search result page clicks are on the natural results. Or, put another way, only 20% of potential visitors come from Adwords clicks.
A Oneupweb eye-tracking study found that searchers are 6 times more likely to click on the organic results than Adwords ads. Other eye-tracking studies back up these findings.
4. Organic rankings can achieve multiple ranking positions
A good organic SEO marketing campaign can result in you achieving multiple page 1 rankings, on the same search results page.
For any given phrase, you could hold not only the top spot, but also other positions on the same search results page too – something not possible with PPC.
5. Organic rankings will reduce the cost of your PPC campaigns
Google rewards its advertisers with lower bid costs if their target website is already ranked well for the keywords they’re bidding for.
If your website is ranked highly organically for the keywords you’re targeting with Adwords, you’ll see your Google quality score raised and thus your bid amounts significantly reduced. For this reason, it’s very well worth investing in getting your site ranked highly in the organic results.
There are of course lots of different ways you can improve your quality score. This Google video explains the basics in an easy-to-understand way.
6. Organic SEO campaigns lead to greater web-wide exposure
One facet of a good organic SEO campaign is link-building—the process of building links on other websites pointing to yours. These links can be gained, for example, by writing and distributing articles.
People read these articles and follow the links within them, providing an additional source of traffic beyond the search engine results pages alone.
So, while PPC is a great way to dip in and start generating traffic right away, test new keywords or top-up traffic, it’s far better in the long-run to focus on gaining quality organic rankings as a smart, long-term strategy.
