Should I move from PPC to SEO?

[jamiesalisbury]

I'm currently spending around £6k per year on Adwords PPC, with consistently decent results - around 65p per click, and it's kept the business ticking over nicely.

Still, it does seem like we're losing a little ground compared to previous years, although I know our competitors are also struggling.

I've been quoted a similar yearly figure of around £6k from several good SEO companies to get us on the first few results on the organic searches for 3/4 key words (presumably the same ones that perform best on PPC?).

I've heard many people say SEO works better, but £6k is a big risk for me to spend, and it would totally wipe out any budget I have to spend on PPC. If it doesn't work, then I'm a bit screwed, however if it works better than PPC my business could take a really nice jump.

Obviously the problem with SEO is that you can't dip your toe in the water and test it like you can with PPC.

I don't have any time (or knowledge) for doing any SEO myself. I'm pretty good at the Adwords stuff though, and have good quality scores.

My main business is a function band, mostly specialising in corporate events and weddings.

If anyone has any views on whether it would be worth the risk of shifting from PPC to SEO I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks

Jamie

 

Obviously the problem with SEO is that you can't dip your toe in the water and test it like you can with PPC.


Jamie

Yes you can a good freelance ethical SEO will not tie you to a contract.

Earl

 

[darren atkinson]

You should (like sirearl) suggested find someone who is willing to get your SEO started for a lower cost, then simply use a portion of your Adwords budget to pay for it.

If the SEO results are achievable then you should go after them as having the traffic will make a massive difference to your business, the main issue is whether they are realistically achievable at a cost which is worthwhile to your business.

 

[Ecler]

Hi Jamie

I think you're asking yourself the wrong question here...search marketing works at its best when both organic and paid activities are undertaken.
SEO is obviously a long term strategy while PPC is a short term activity with measurable results and more flexibility.
So what you need to do as suggested in the posts above is to use a portion of your paid budget to undertake some SEO work, including onsite optimisation and offsite (link building). SEO agencies will very often tie you into a long term contract as their staff costs for example are high, but there are plenty of freelancers or smaller agencies who will offer you more flexibility, whether it is paying by the hour or monthly rolling contracts....
From experience and by looking at multi channel conversion reports for my clients, I can tell you that ppc and SEO feed and support each other with many visitors starting a search via ppc and ending up converting after an organic search for example. Multi channel conversions are becoming the norm, and this is why you need to undertake (if possible) both activities at the same time to cover as much of the search spectrum as possible. At the end of the day, it all boils down to ROI and which marketing channel brings your business revenue, but both channels are critical.
In terms of keywords, there is obviously an overlap between ppc and seo but it is worth researching by channel rather than using the same ones by default.

Hope this helps

Etienne

 

[nitro23456]

Anything with 'wedding' in it is notoriously tricky and hence your quote of £500 per month for 4 or so terms is a good one.

On the other hand if it aint broke why fix it? Times are tough and a slight down turn in your niche isnt unsuprising and doesnt mean your PPC is at fault.

If you want to carry out both concurrently you should perhaps shave off some of the PPC budget and divert it to a smaller number of terms for SEO and it should cost less. Any decent freelancer wont contract you in but bare in mind you will need to give it a few months atleast for any benefit to be realised.

 

[directmarketingadvice]

If anyone has any views on whether it would be worth the risk of shifting from PPC to SEO I'd really appreciate it.

Sounds to me like you've got a pretty good understanding of your situation.

While an SEO might not tie you to a contract, you're still left with a situation where you're putting money up front for results that aren't guaranteed.

Which means you could pay, say, £500 a month for 3 months and see very little return.Should you decide it isn't working and stop it? Or would you be stopping it just before it reached critical mass and gave you top 5 rankings?

You simply can't tell.

Steve

 

[RedEvo]

I think when the OP suggests she can't dip her toe in the water she's referring to the fact that SEO isn't instant like PPC. In this sense you can't dip your toe in.

d

 

[Navneet-gems]

Hello Jamie.

I would like to really help you on this. I have build and done SEO of my own website and tried PPC for 2 years. PPC worked for me moderately, as in, it worked for me quite okay. I was satisfied. But then I came across this SEO company in India, that was ready to do SEO for me. it was hard for me to understand them. But they are doing an excellent job for me. I pay very less. And I am getting 40 keywords at the moment.

Let me know if you want the reference.
PS: You can trust me on this, I researched for months untill i found this company. And its a difficult with the Indian accent. But they are very organized and professional.

Navneet

 

[makeusvisible]

I'm really interested in the topic o PPC v SEO at the moment....... moving from one to the other can be a really tricky process, in terms of taking the slowly slowly approach so not to affect your current visitor numbers.

I have a customer who was spending circa £1.5k per month on adwords. I've been able to reduce this by £500 within the first 3 months, with a view to totally eliminating adwords over the next few months. Of course the big benefit of SEO is that as and when keywords rank well you can often reduce the time spent on them, and shift focus to new keywords.....giving you a growing portfolio of keywords.

Ideally your SEO should have a list of your current adwords keywords, along with their cost and CTR. In an ideal world they would also be able to look at your bounce rates too. Based on the above you can choose which keywords to start with first, and remove them from your adwords campaigns.
When selecting an SEO, ask them for references from clients they have worked with previous to achieve what you want.... and make sure you dont get tied into any contracts. A good SEO should be able to show you some real life adwords 'v' SEO examples as part of their portfolio.

 

[fisicx]

There is an alternative.

Increasing the number of conversions from your existing visitors has an immediate effect. It's something you can do at almost no cost because it's mostly rewording content and adjusting layout.

 

[jamiesalisbury]

Hi all, many thanks for the replies so far, very informative and useful.

I understand that using both SEO and PPC is recommended, but if I do pay £6k for SEO then I can't afford PPC.

My understanding of SEO that it was simply not worth spending less than this as results would be minimal. I was quoted a figure for a minimum of a year by 2 very reputable companies, who although obviously can't guarantee results, have both got track records of placing companies number 1 ranking on Google for the industries I'm interested in.

If for instance I pay someone £1000 for SEO, what do I actually get in terms of results? Google page 3 or 4? And is that actually worth it?

 

[seoswat]

If you have soley been focusing on PPC, i certainly wouldnt just "swap" to SEO.

I myself run an SEO web agency, but one thing i can tell you is that when you start SEO, it will take some time for you to see "benefiting" results. By that i mean yes your rankings will increase from say page 5 to page 3, but until you start getting on page 1 then you really are not benefiting at all as no one will find you. So your looking at an overlap period of around 2-3 months (that is a guess without seeing your URL and niche).

I would tend to cut your PPC down by 50% per month and invest 25% into SEO (and keep 25% each month) - do this for first 3 months and see where your site stands organically.

I would strongly advise though that you dont just ditch PPC and swap over, else everything will grind to a halt.

 

[Andrew Baker]

I'm currently spending around £6k per year on Adwords PPC, with consistently decent results - around 65p per click, and it's kept the business ticking over nicely.

Still, it does seem like we're losing a little ground compared to previous years, although I know our competitors are also struggling.

I've been quoted a similar yearly figure of around £6k from several good SEO companies to get us on the first few results on the organic searches for 3/4 key words (presumably the same ones that perform best on PPC?).

I would look at this from a different perspective...

You are paying £6K for advertising on Google per year, OK so a few simple metrics to check for that £6K...

Simply for AdWords:-

1. What is your gross profit? (I don't want to know the figure, I'm just suggesting you should know this)
2. What is your CPA (Cost Per Acquisition/Action - in other words how much does each conversion cost you and is this under your target value)?
3. What is your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
4. What is your conversion rate for the account?

So if you now spend £6K on SEO you should be looking to better these metrics, set some targets and make some projections.

I would throw these figures into the mix when negotiating and selecting an SEO partner. They need to understand how to make you a profit, not just get 4 KWs to the top of Google. Times have changed, use a company that understands conversion rates, landing page optimisation and multi-channel attribution.

I'm not advocating you ditch PPC whatsoever, if it's working for you (based on the metrics I've mentioned above keep it going, in fact see if you can optimise it further however it's important not to be 100% reliant on just one marketing channel, PPC & SEO do go hand in hand, just take a look at your Analytics Multi Channel Funnel reports and run a SEO & PPC interaction report.

Search results have changed drastically, SPEW (Search Plus Your World) is just about to hit the UK, there is no universal rank checking for organic results any more, results differ from user to user across devices, personal preferences, location, social interactions, there is no "you are top for this KW" any more. The closest you'll get to this is using Google Webmaster Tools which is still a bit flakey in the accuracy of results and certainly isn't specific to google.co.uk.

Hope that helps.

 

[fattony]

Go with nitro you wont be disappointed

 

[adventurelife]

No discussion really

Option 1 keep paying ppc for ever at £6k per year

Option 2 invest in SEO and reduce your annual cost and more than likely increase the returns.

From a business perspective option 2 wins every time

Best results is obviously a combination of both, and although I am a strong supporter of SEO, it is a snake pit and it is very easy to get burned. Time spent on research is worth it, you will have to learn the basics in order to be able to pick who you want to work with.

Do not take £6k a year as you have been quoted as a figure that is set in stone

 

[Coachhirecomparison]

I'm currently spending around £6k per year on Adwords PPC, with consistently decent results - around 65p per click, and it's kept the business ticking over nicely.

Still, it does seem like we're losing a little ground compared to previous years, although I know our competitors are also struggling.

I've been quoted a similar yearly figure of around £6k from several good SEO companies to get us on the first few results on the organic searches for 3/4 key words (presumably the same ones that perform best on PPC?).

I've heard many people say SEO works better, but £6k is a big risk for me to spend, and it would totally wipe out any budget I have to spend on PPC. If it doesn't work, then I'm a bit screwed, however if it works better than PPC my business could take a really nice jump.

Obviously the problem with SEO is that you can't dip your toe in the water and test it like you can with PPC.

I don't have any time (or knowledge) for doing any SEO myself. I'm pretty good at the Adwords stuff though, and have good quality scores.

My main business is a function band, mostly specialising in corporate events and weddings.

If anyone has any views on whether it would be worth the risk of shifting from PPC to SEO I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks

Jamie

You need to carry on using PPC but also gradually move over to SEO. To a certain extent you may always want to use PPC depending on how profitable it can be for you.

We started doing SEO around 4 months ago and we are just starting to see some half decent movement now.

Bits at a time and dont put all your eggs in one basket.

Good luck with it.

James

 

[jamiesalisbury]

Thanks all, so the concensus seems to be that I CAN gradually test the water with SEO, which I didn't think was possible.

How do I choose who to work with? I've had quite a few direct messages from people offering their services, but I don't really know where to start.

 

[nitro23456]

Go with nitro you wont be disappointed

thanks, glad to have helped

 

[seoswat]

Thanks all, so the concensus seems to be that I CAN gradually test the water with SEO, which I didn't think was possible.

How do I choose who to work with? I've had quite a few direct messages from people offering their services, but I don't really know where to start.

I dont think people are allowed to send direct messages offering their SEO service unless you are specifically asking for that service.

But as i mentioned above, start by getting a free SEO audit of your website done, any SEO agency that doesnt offer this, you should stay away from anyway.

Also ensure that you are not held to a contract i.e a 12 month contract. Make sure its a month on month rolling one so that you can leave when you feel you need to.

Finally, ensure they provide as a minimum, a full report monthly which goes into details about exactly what work has been done with links to the work so that you have a record and can work with in future, or you can just check over to see the quality of work being done.

Very annoying and bad for a client when they pay over £100 per month for SEO and they just get a basic ranking table and say "work done off site" etc.

 

[nitro23456]

as well as the above you need to ask for examples of rankings achieved and also for testimonials.

 

[adventurelife]

Thanks all, so the concensus seems to be that I CAN gradually test the water with SEO, which I didn't think was possible.

How do I choose who to work with? I've had quite a few direct messages from people offering their services, but I don't really know where to start.

Do not do anything until you have spent time doing research and getting a basic understanding of SEO and what it can do for your business. Then watch and listen to those who sell the service, make a short list based on your judgement and recommendations and then and only then speak to that shortlist.

If you do not have time to learn about basic SEO and how it can work for your business you will just be taking pot luck with the supplier, you may be lucky but many are not by taking this route.

Sorry that it is not more straight forward , I know it should be but SEO industry is very difficult for a business person with no online knowledge to deal with.

 

[directmarketingadvice]

Surely, if PPC is profitable, it adds to the cashflow of the business and, therefore, would pay for the SEO?

 

[cmcp]

I've had quite a few direct messages from people offering their services, but I don't really know where to start.

What are the usernames of those who contacted you over Private Messages?

 

[cmcp]

If PPC is giving you a return why turn it off? Even if you get the SEO sorted, still do your tests with PPC. If it brings in sales I'd keep it on. Optimising your campaigns and on site conversions is a good suggestion too.

 

[S-Marketing]

How do I choose who to work with? I've had quite a few direct messages from people offering their services, but I don't really know where to start.

You could start by doing us all a favour by reporting the pm's you got.

 

[NeilTompkins]

Ditto some of the other comments. If PPC is giving you a good ROI, I wouldn't turn if off otherwise it will affect your current business. However, ALL websites have a opportunity for organic search improvements.

How does your current site currently rank for the phrases you are looking to target. I would suspect that just a few tweaks here and there, would see a improvement in your organic rankings to start.

 

[makeusvisible]

What are the usernames of those who contacted you over Private Messages?

I second that question. If they are willing to break the rules here, chances are they are willing to do the same in their SEO efforts!

 

[omnivore]

don't mean to hi-jack this thread but i have a question directly related to the the central question (ie choice between ppc and seo)

at what point should seo take over from ppc? and indeed does it ever completely take over.

for example if your seo eventually gets your keyword to P1 on page 1,would you stop using that keyword on ppc? or would it still be worthwhile to do both in that circumstance?

 

[jamiesalisbury]

So in terms of assembling a shortlist of companies to look at, surely the best companies are those who rank highly for search terms "SEO" or "search engine optimization" (like justsearch.seo)- is it as simple as that?!?

Or are those companies going to be too expensive? If so, how would I go about finding cheaper companies who are still good?

Re: the direct messages, I'm new here so I had no idea it wasn't allowed. If you don't mind I won't grass anyone up - feels a bit odd to do that in my first thread in a forum!

 

[FreelanceScribbler]

SEO is a long term investment
PPC is a short term investment

So while SEO may be expensive in order to obtain rankings, the long term profits will cover this cost. So a good way to offset these early losses would be to use PPC at the same time to generate quick profits. Just make sure you have a very good landing page in order to convert as many visitors as possible.

 

[adventurelife]

don't mean to hi-jack this thread but i have a question directly related to the the central question (ie choice between ppc and seo)

at what point should seo take over from ppc? and indeed does it ever completely take over.

for example if your seo eventually gets your keyword to P1 on page 1,would you stop using that keyword on ppc? or would it still be worthwhile to do both in that circumstance?

In my case I only use ppc for research then I seo the findings if they are positive. The reality is even if you have seo nailed you should still be using ppc for those areas your seo is not covering. That said even though I know this I do not as it is just to big a job to cover all areas and not enough time in the day.

 

[adventurelife]

I suggest not, coz it is hard to find a good SEO company to rank your site with whitehat tech and your PPC cost is not so huge, no need to change...

Sorry but that is rubbish. Anyone who spends enough time on this forum reading what the seo's say can make a sensible decision on which ones know what they are talking about and which do not and this is just one forum. Follow that up by speaking to their past clients, not the ones they feed you and you again get another base covered. Speak to several about how difficult your particular area is to seo and again you have another based covered.

It is not hard to find a good seo company but it does take time and that is what most people looking for this service do not invest.

From the SEO point of view they really need to do something to make the industry more customer friendly and weed out the scam merchants. What I am not sure but it is needed.

£6k a year not huge? 5 years = £30k and still no regular business coming in without paying for it everyone to their own but not my way of doing business. Feb enquiry value 6 figures zero from ppc . Seo cost nil as the investment was years back and is just touched up when needed. Business is not short term

 

[WhizzPeople]

I would suggest you to run both SEO and PPC for a while, spend small amount after SEO for at least 2/3 months. Then decide your direction.

 

[jamiesalisbury]

Thanks for all the feedback everyone, I'll look into it in a couple of weeks time. Appreciate the time and effort in everyones comments!

 

[vincent80]

Jamie when your currently paying around 65p per click for your chosen keywords, on average what position do your PPC ads appear? I'm assuming they all appear on the first page of Google?

Where does your website rank organically in the search for your keywords that you’re using for PPC? What page, if any?

Making an assumption here, but if you’re paying around 65p per click I don't think the competition will be that high to get your website organically listed on the search. Any decent SEO individual or company should be able to help. But check them out first and ask them to show you current sites they are associated with etc.

From personal experience I've always found that organic listings bring a MUCH better click through rate than adwords. As an example I have a client who I have ranked No.1 on the first page for a tough keyword and sometimes I'll run an adwords campaign for them for the same keyword. Being No.1 in the search brings them around 150-160 visits per day for that keyword and PPC will bring them around 10-15 visitors per day.

(Incidentally in the past when that website lost its organic No.1 spot on the first page and dropped down to around 5th spot, so still on the first page of Google but below the fold, organic traffic dropped by around two-thirds to an average of 50 clicks per day. So the goal should not be to just be on page one of Google, but in the top 3 positions, above the fold)

So in their example and using the metrics above, if they relied just on PPC then they would need to wait around 10 days to get the number of visitors for that keyword, when currently they are able to get that many in one day by being No.1 in the search results. So with your own website what kind of an effect would a five or ten fold in visitors have? You would know all your price points, how many visitors needed for sale, lifetime cost of visitor etc

If you do decide to go down the organic SEO road and hire someone, then depending on the current off-page status of your site it could be anything up to around 3 months before you start seeing any positive SERP’s movement (possibly even 6 months depending on the competition of the keywords you are looking to rank for and what the current link profile of your website is).