Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
compared to Pay per Click (PPC) advertising
I'm often asked which is the best way to generate traffic to your website. As we don't offer either of these services I hope you'll find that my opinion is fairly impartial.
By the way, this page will print nicely, so it may be easier to print it out to read at leisure.
SEO is where the content of your web pages are modified in the expectation that they will come near the top of search engine results for certain search words or phrases. SEO is often viewed as a "black art" that only expensive professionals can accomplish but there are plenty of resources available on the internet (including this website) that enable anyone to try their luck at SEO.
PPC is where you pay when someone clicks on one of your adverts, Google adwords is a good example. You can set it up so that your advert will only appear when someone types specific keywords into Google, e.g. "shoes brighton", "shoe shops in brighton" etc..
You only pay Google when someone clicks on your advert. The more you are prepared to pay per click the higher your advert will go in the "sponsored links" on the right, and the more visitors you will get to your website.
The pros of SEO
Traffic to your website is effectively free once you have paid the cost of having your website optimised.
Overall cost per visitor could be very low if the SEO company does a very good job.
For fairly esoteric or localised businesses SEO may bring better results than PPC. With PPC your adverts are shown to a wide geographical area (but see below).
If you are prepared to do some legwork you can do your own SEO, but you should cost your time into the equation.
The cons of SEO
Your site will probably slip in the search engine rankings unless it is regularly re-optimised to take account of new search engine algorithms (the programmes that are used to rank search results), your competition, changes in keyword popularity and other factors.
You pay before you get the traffic, so you may have to work hard to get your money back if you don't get the traffic.
Search engines take a while to update their results so you may not see results for up to a few months. Your cashflow will be worse initially than with PPC because you have to pay a lump to the SEO company up front.
Cost per visitor could be very high if the SEO company does not get you good results.
If you pick the wrong "black hat" SEO company you might see your website banned from some search engines. Naughty SEO companies use tricks to fool the search engines into giving higher ranking to a website than they think it deserves. The results might be great, but it's a big risk.
Be sure that the keywords you are being found under are the words potential customers would use to find your product or service, rather than ones that are easy for the SEO company to get ranked highly. Otherwise you may end up with lots of visitors and no sales, or high ranking but few visitors.
The pros of PPC
Geographic targetting of PPC adverts is getting better and this is an area to keep an eye on. If PPC adverts can be targetted to a town or city they will become very cost effective for businesses dealing primarily in their localised area.
You pay as you go, after you have received the traffic, so there is no risk of paying money and getting no visitors as a result.
You know exactly how much you will be paying per visitor to your website so you can budget and forecast much more accurately.
Our experience is that PPC visitors are far more likely to want to buy our service than vistors that came via natural search results (how did you find 123Live?), but this may not apply to every industry.
You start getting results within minutes of setting up your campaign.
You are in full control of the keywords that your advert will appear under.
You get to write the adverts (which can be fun), and you can compare results to see which keywords and adverts generate the most cost effective enquiries or sales (at least you can if you are using 123Live).
The cons of PPC
If you set a high daily budget to start with you could end up spending a lot of money. Start low and build up slowly.
It does involve mental effort, unless you get someone else to manage it for you.
Conclusion
This is only my opinion, but for most small businesses the speed of results, better cashflow and predictability of PPC make it the first choice. Once you have a few months worth of results under your belt it may be worth showing these to an SEO company and asking if they can improve on them.
It's definitely worth doing your own SEO as you build up your website content, but don't get obsessed with it, remember that your primary audience is people not machines.
Of course, it's vital that your website is built the right way for search engines in the first place, and you'll need to be able to easily edit the key elements of your pages that search engines read - 123Live gives you both (sorry - end of commercial!).
