Multi-Channel Marketing

Where should you spend most of your time, money, and efforts -- SEO or PPC?  Does your business really need both organic, natural search (that is, the regular search engine results) as well as paid search (that is, pay per click, PPC ads)?   

To make things even more difficult, you hear about social media networks, pay-per-call, blogs and innumerable others as they develop.  But do any of these choices make sense?  The reality is that the engines still maintain the largest market share of all searches online.  So for most businesses the answer is: Yes. 

Let's compare each.

	Organic Search	Paid Search
Position on the page	Generally more visible	Less visible on right side, except ads that appear above natural search results
Speed of results	Several months	0 to 2 days
Trust level	Moderate	A bit less trust -- if searchers can actually tell the difference between a paid ad and natural search results.
Performance Performance	Influenced by description that appears.	May be equal or better due to the control you have over the description.
Difficulty of getting top positions	Can be difficult	Usually fairly easy -- if you're willing to bid high enough
Traffic volume	Depends on position for various keywords	Can be high for all important keywords
Cost	Very low (except for set-up)	Low to high (depending on competition)

 Many novice marketers avoid using PPC ads because they're afraid it will cost too much. But in fact, PPC ads may be the only way you'll get any decent traffic to your site at all, unless you (a) have a rather non-competitive business or (b) have optimized your website to rank high in natural search for the keywords important to you. The big advantage of PPC advertising is that you can get up-to-speed within 0 to a couple of days on Google and Yahoo (for editors to approve your ads and keywords).  Paid search may also help you to generate a sufficient volume of traffic and sales to provide enough revenue to support your business. 

Should you rely on paid search entirely? No! Outsourcing search engine optimization (SEO) usually begins at about $1,500 and can go up from there, depending on the size of your site and competition for your keywords.  But when you compare the set-up charge for SEO to the monthly cost, SEO emerges as a real bargain. Typically, natural search generates low to moderate traffic at a very low cost while paid search generates moderate to high traffic for moderate to high cost. Together, natural search helps bring down your average cost per sale to a point that you can still make money.

Are there situations in which you shouldn't use paid search at all?  Yes.  If your products are priced too low you may not break even with PPC or if your site isn’t designed to get a high enough conversion rate or doesn't persuade visitors to contact you about your service, PPC will appear much too expensive. 

The only way you'll know whether or not paid search will help build your business is to give it a fair test for two or three months. It may take several weeks to get your ads and keywords working optimally. But if you've followed best practices in setting up and running a paid search campaign and you're still not getting the results you need to be profitable after two to three months, then and only then is it time to pull the plug.