There are two schools of thought when it comes to what form of internet marketing yields the biggest payoff. One focuses on the short term. One focuses on the long term. Both are wrong.
The first says that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the way to go. Spends thousands of dollars and have your website tailored to come up naturally in organic search results (what you and everyone else actually goes to Google for). Every day, billions of people in thousands of cities search for millions of different things, and fully half of them are for something local. Appearing naturally at the top of those results is guaranteed to send clicks (and thus eyes, and their owners) to your site, which, if properly built, will compel the web surfer to some kind of action.
But many people don't have the budget, or they can't see far enough down the road to see the pay-off. Many will engage in an intensive SEO strategy, knowing it can take 6 to 9 months to pay off, and then quit after 4 months. You can show them that they were raising up, but they can't understand why they're not seeing much more traffic now that they're on page 3 than they were on page 20+. Even after you joke about "the best place to hide a dead body" being page 2 of Google, they still don't get it.
Such people want immediate results. Pay-per-click (PPC) offers those immediate results. You can start an ad campaign with Google and get leads within 24 hours if you know what your doing. Or, you can waste hundreds of dollars getting non-converting clicks. See, there's a gamble involved with PPC. If your landing pages suck, or your wording is off, or you're targeting the wrong group in the wrong way, you're gonna spend. Lots.
Worse than that, the moment you stop spending, the leads dry up. That's the inherent danger of PPC.
SEO is the smart, long-term strategy because it is an investment that will pay dividends once established. The adage says, why buy the cow when the milk is free -- but the milk isn't free, and neither is the cow. But once you buy the cow and take care of it for a while, the milk comes cheaply.
SEO is the investment; SEO is the cow that pays in unending dividends once invested in. But even still, some people can't drop $10K in one year for something that is nearly guaranteed to work.
So how do you choose which is best for your business?
Don't choose.
If you're smart, you'll "diversify" your marketing portfolio, and dabble in the PPC market for quick returns, and invest in the SEO market for long-term dividends.
Yet so many people get bogged down in the debate that they never take action, or doubt the action that they take, and it never comes to fruition.
What are your thoughts on this?
