One question that thousands of business owners and marketing managers ask themselves daily when searching for methods to appeal to a larger audience to increase conversion is whether to go the SEO route or speed things up with PPC. This is not a debate, but rather an attempt to identify the needs of your website and your audience.
Your website, the content, the margins available and the amount of time you can invest into selling the prospect will invariably impact upon the method you choose.
We know marketing is a numbers game, but similarly, selling the right product or service to the right prospect at the right time is ultimately what conversion is all about (which is why most opt for PPC and less noise to filter in search results).
Similarly, not every product is model-specific or customer-centric from a value viewpoint such that paying for each click makes sense from a budgetary point of view. Particularly when you know that your product of service extends beyond the realm of an impulse purchase (such as a high ticket item).
Pay per click marketing gets a mere fragment of the traffic of organic search, however not all organic searches are from consumers interested in purchasing. Broad match organic searches may range from curious information gatherers conducting a study for research, individuals compiling statistical data or a myriad of other possibilities.
Proposing a product or service without firmly setting out your objectives by proposing the wrong offer at the wrong time or to the wrong prospect is also a waste of resource . Timing, context and relevance must lead the charge when combined with any search medium to drive traffic or generate appeal.
Not every prospect purchases instantaneously, some deliberate for days, weeks or months while others act on impulse. Credibility, trust and professionalism are important factors regardless of the promotional platform, so after you manage to attract the significant proportion of your market segment to your pages tracking and refinement should be the next preoccupation. Yet, without visitors to buy your products or skim through your pages for relevant items, none of your compelling calls to action, enticing offers or incredible content will matter, so, it truly does boil down to the quality of traffic.
The advantages of SEO (more potential traffic for conversion) and PPC (Higher Conversion but less volume) are clear. SEO pulls more traffic, which, depending on your landing pages (which could be any page in your site) determine the ultimate outcome of balanced between bounce rate and conversion.
Although PPC can filter out the noise and cut to the chase when it comes to filtering traffic to your content, the likelihood of people clicking your ad vs. an organic result is minuscule since roughly 8 out of 10 choose SEO over paid search results.
However, if a healthy margin is present, the solution is scalable. You can either increase the PPC spend to see if surges for stemmed keywords improve conversion, or hedge it with SEO as a hybrid and eventually wean your pages off PPC marketing.
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