SEO v PPC for generating sales leads which is best?

One of the biggest questions we get asked is which is best for driving traffic PPC or SEO (Pay-per-click or Search Engine Optimisation)

There are arguments on both sides, but we believe it depends on where you are in your marketing process, your budget and the speed in which you need results.
Understanding exactly what you are trying to achieve is your first goal.

What you want to know is…

What are the keywords that will attract an audience interested in buying your products or services.
What keywords are driving volumes of prospects and are consistently converted into sales.

Now you have established your goals the next question is.

How can I discover the answers?

• Use PPC to explore your markets

We recommend PPC first because for a small investment you can target a variety of keywords associated with your business. You can quickly see what keywords are creating volumes of traffic and which keywords are most likely to result in a positive interest in your business.

IMPORTANT! Remember PPC is full of pitfalls for the inexperienced advertiser so if you are going to do this yourself please get good information!

Now use SEO

Once you have discovered the most profitable keywords to target then you can apply those keywords to your website using SEO.

SEO then comes into it’s own because unlike PPC when you create a page once that page is then indexed by the search engines and stays there unlike PPC which switches off soon as you stop paying. You can then keep it on page one for as long as it’s commercially viable.

What this means is you can get to page one using SEO. If your market is competitive then your SEO will need attention to maintain it’s position.

Test and repeat

PPC is great for discovering either new customers or new markets or for testing sales processes for new products so repeat the process again for other products or services and create a number of additional landing pages for SEO.

The dangers of using SEO first.

To do SEO well it’s not cheap to do properly and the results can take months to see. If you get it wrong then you have to start again and test new keywords and wait again. This is either expensive, time consuming or both. Money and time is usually the biggest enemy of most businesses.

So where are you in the process.

Do you know what keywords are converting into sales on your website?

• If the answer is no then you need to either learn PPC and give it a try yourself or get professional advice.
• If you know that certain keywords are converting into sales then you can either learn SEO or get professional advice..

The third option for those of you on a tight budget.

One other way to see a traffic trend towards your website is to set-up a blog and write about your business products or services and add Google Analytics to track your visitors. You can also use the Google Keyword tool to see which keywords to target. You will need to write at least 2 posts per week, ideally 1 post per day to see results. So if budget is tight, but time is on your side this is a great option.

To learn more about setting up a SEO focused website on a budget click WordPress SEO