SEO vs PPC - What Should You Invest In First?

today I'm going to be going over a question I get pretty often when I'm talking to clients and that's should I invest in pay-per-click advertising or should I invest in SEO and the uh example I'm going to give you to start with is let's just say you own a garage door repair company so this is garage door repair and Bridgewater New Jersey the town I grew up in so if we look here what you're going to see is when somebody searches this exact search term you have two different local Services ads up here at the top in addition to more garage door Pros if people click here you have an advertisement here an advertisement here and then you get down to the Google Maps listings and after that you finally get to the actual organic results so the question is where should a company like this invest their money and let's use a couple different data points here to kind of prove what we should be doing and how we should be investing our money long term um and let's get started by just going over SEO versus PPC so search engine optimization the process of improving a website's ranking basically using keyword research content creation link building optimizing a website with internal linking making sure the website architecture and the user experience is all set up as well as it possibly can be uh so that's search engine optimization it's basically targeting keywords to rank higher in these search results and when you're doing search engine optimization your main goal should be what keywords can actually drive results for our company so obviously if you're running advertising on your website then you know driving more traffic can still be a great way to drive more income but for a lot of businesses they're really trying to drive people to their website so that they can drive leads and they can drive new customers now the other option for companies if especially if you're trying to rank higher in the Google search results in the Bing search results in actual search engines is paperclick advertising now pay-per-click advertising can also include Facebook ads it can include Pinterest ads LinkedIn ads Twitter ad wherever you want to run your advertising uh so it can include all sorts of different paid advertising channels but it's the process of paying for ad placements that drive clicks your website if you're going to get started with pay-per-click advertising you're generally going to run Facebook ads or Google ads to get started and then if you're running Google ads you should also be running b/ Microsoft advertising especially if you have a large enough budget to do some testing PPC includes any paid advertising that will increase traffic with the purpose of driving conversions now when it comes to SEO your goal should be driving conversions as well obviously there are a lot of different content based companies that want to drive traffic to their website because then they can actually monetize that traffic with either advertising or affiliate offers but generally it this is the question I get very often should I invest in SEO or PPC and this is really going to be more geared towards a that has a a limited budget so if we come over here real quick so a company that offers garage door repair in a specific area is generally not going to have a 3040 $50,000 marketing budget it's generally you have okay we have this much set aside for marketing every month how do we spend that money basically SEO and PPC are two of the best ways to actually spend your money now to give you a quick overview of a company that does both priceline.com so I searched book flights Based on data from keyword Surfer it's showing there's 165,000 monthly search volume uh for the United States of America and the average cost per click for Google ads campaigns is $261 so if you're driving people to your website and you have flight booking that's something that you offer on your website then you need to make sure that you're doing it profitably so that's one of the major challenges with PPC advertising priceline.com spends a ton of money on Google ads on all sorts of paid advertising Expedia as well Expedia is one of the largest Google ads advertisers they may be in the top 20 with the amount that they spend every single year and one of the things that I like to look at and I'll use spyfu and I'll use some of the data from sem Rush as well if we just look at priceline.com and we're looking at the SEO research for priceline.com they drive a ton of organic clicks to their website so if we look at the Last 5 Years you can see this is their SEO overview the their organic keywords and how much they drove to their website over the course of the last five years you can see it there's a drop off here which a lot of a lot of different websites experience this drop off a lot of people were at home during covid doing a lot more searching so sometimes there were websites that were getting a lot of traffic in 2020 that ended up dropping and then it it kind of stabilizes a bit here as you can see so they've been pretty consistent with a couple down months a couple months that were a little bit higher and one of the things that you're going to see is if you look at their estimated monthly SEO clicks 1.83 million so that's a massive massive number their estimated monthly SEO clicks value so if we just scroll over here it's saying there's a value an SEO value that each paid keyword has a certain cost per click so they're saying if they were to pay for the same traffic it would be almost $10 million a month so if we come over to sem rush and we look at the same data in sem Rush sem rush I think is a little bit more accurate than what spyfu has and if we look at priceline.com we're looking at their organic research here they're showing their traffic 4.2 million and this is alltime traffic so you see it's low low they see a huge jump here in 2015 and been pretty consistent since then with some down down down times and some up times but overall pretty consistent it's saying that their organic traffic every month is 4.2 million and their organic traffic cost is 4.4 million so even if sem Rush is overestimating this slightly it's still a lot of money to be spending on traffic that they are currently getting from the organic search results so when somebody searches for things like book flights or travel deals or all sorts of things Price Line ranks pretty high for a lot of these keywords same with Expedia so Expedia is running ads right here and if we scroll down we also have Expedia in the fifth organic result so there is a a difficult question when you're a much smaller company and it's where should I invest my money SEO or PPC so some of the benefits of investing in SEO increase organic traffic so it increases your website search engine ranking for Relevant keywords you can drive organic traffic that will lead to conversions and if you're getting let's just say for example every single month your SEO traffic drives you 50 different leads so whatever service it is that you're offering with with your search engine optimization you're driving 50 leads every single month and then you can turn those leads into customers so the reason why I generally recommend investing in SEO first is it's a cost-effective long-term strategy so if you're not looking for instant results if you don't need instant results to essentially save your business SEO is going to be more cost effective long-term than paid advertising and then you're not 100% relying on paid advertising so relying just on paid advertising can lead to Rising costs over time and increased cost per click can lead to an increased cost per conversion that can hurt your profits now some of the benefits of investing in PPC the main one immediate visibility and traffic you can use targeted advertising and you can measure your results so if you say I want to spend $1,000 and I want to see what this $1,000 gets my business at the end of this month PPC allows you to place your ads at the top of search results driving immediate traffic so the example I used earlier when we're looking at people looking for garage door repair in Bridgewater New Jersey you can see people are are using local Services ads because I call this company they pay for that phone call they can quickly turn me from somebody who gives them a phone call to somebody who is actually a customer same thing over here with Precision overhead garage door so I can book directly online or I can call them directly as well same thing with some of these different advertising you can see we have a couple different companies here that are also advertising and these are just standard search ad so if I click here go to their website they want me to either give them a call or they want me to fill out one of their contacts form so this is why you want to invest in PPC as well but it can be difficult if you're looking at a question like here's your scenario and this is generally the way the question works when I do get it from a client is you have $2,000 monthly budget to invest in SEO or PPC how do you invest the money so the answer that I would generally recommend is investing it into SEO now what you could potentially do is say you know what let me sign up for a $1,000 SEO package and we'll run $1,000 in paid advertising see if we can drive some profitable results from Google ads from Bing ads from Facebook ads where wherever we're running our advertising so that would generally be my recommendation I would never say put your entire budget into pay-per-click advertising without having any type of interest in SEO without having any type of investment in SEO the main reason why I say that is just using my own brand Surfside PPC if we look at my SEO research for Surfside PPC I don't even drive that many SEO clicks over 13,000 SEO clicks my estimated SEO clicks value $241,000 according to spyfu now I also drive a lot of clicks for keywords related to Google ads these keywords tend to have very high cost per click so if we look over here at sem rush and look at their data they're saying my traffic cost is 14,000 probably a little bit closer there but I don't have the budget to spend $144,000 on paid advertising I don't have the budget to spend $241,000 on paid advertising this is probably more closely how much that my actual traffic cost is but I also do get more organic search traffic than 715 so it's not like they have this exactly right here uh with the amount of traffic that I'm getting none of these tools are perfect uh but we can look at how much we can expect to pay if we're actually trying to drive traffic from some of these keywords so whether you're trying to rank for something like book flights which good luck because all these companies are massive companies that spend a ton of money on paid advertising and SEO or if you're trying to especially for local company you're trying to rank higher for some of the local keywords I would recommend investing in SEO trying to get some back links trying to get some content created for your website and you could either hire a freelancer to do this or what you could do is hire an SEO agency in addition I also am for running paid advertising so if you're saying which one should I do should I do one or the other I would say SEO if you're saying how should I split my budget maybe what you do is you put 75% into SEO you put 25% into pay-per-click advertising the main thing I I can't stress to you enough is with PPC you are getting immediate traffic so you can set up a Google ads campaign today and you're going to have traffic pretty quickly you can use targeted advertising you can Target the main keywords for your business but Google ads Facebook ads all of these also take time to actually optimize your campaigns anyone who says it's a quick immediate results is lying to you and they're probably trying to sell you something so there's measur measurable results with uh your pay-per-click advertising campaign so you can see how many conversions you're driving you can see your return on ad spend you can say okay I spent $2,000 this month and it returned $5,000 in revenue for my business so maybe what we can do is we can invest a little bit more next month and we can continue to optimize our campaigns with SEO it really is the best long-term strategy and I've really focused on SEO for my own business because the cost of trying to actually Target keywords like Google ads management for example so if we if I targeted the keyword Google ads management company you can see there's some ads up at the top here let's see 90 average monthly searches $71 per click now you could probably Drive clicks for or less but the cost per click to try to Target some of these keywords is incredibly high so I'd be better off spending all of my time trying to rank for at least one keyword related to Google ads agency PPC agency Google ads agency pricing Google ads management for specific niches so maybe I say okay I want to rank for Google ads management for universities or for healthcare or for doctors or whatever it may be I want to try to find some of these different companies that spend a lot of money on paid advertising that would be a better use of my time my money than trying to invest all of my money in payperclick advertising so when it comes to the question should I invest in SEO or PPC for the most part I generally recommend investing in SEO first investing more money in SEO up front because it is a good long-term strategy and then paid advertising can also be a great strategy to go along with your SEO so if you're driving let's say we use our our number before 50 leads from SEO then what you can say is okay I'm going to use the income from these 50 leads that I'm driving from SEO from these customers that I'm driving from this growth that I'm getting from SEO and we're going to invest some of that into paid advertising so should you invest in SEO or PPC probably both but SEO is where I invest my money first thank you for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surf Side PPC YouTube channel

Channel: Surfside PPC

Views: 3,074

Keywords: seo, ppc, seo vs ppc, seo or ppc, seo or google ads, google ads or seo, search engine optimization or pay per click, ppc advertising, search engine optimization

Id: XqzpVUKNSKg

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2023