The Advantages of Natural SEO vs PPC

Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that PPC, like Google Adwords PPC campaigns, has advantages too. PPC campaigns can be really handy for a number of reasons:

If money is not a problem, and a really good PPC campaign is applied, your site is virtually guaranteed a page one Google search result for just about any particular keyphrase you or your PPC campaign manager has targetted.

PPC campaigns are also useful if your site does not have much text content, and if not having much content on your site is the way you’d always like to keep your site.

However, I’m much more of a natural SEO fan.

To me, the greatest advantage of a good natural search result is that if anybody clicks a good natural search result to visit a site, that click does not cost the website owner a thing, whereas if a person clicks a Google Adwords PPC (Pay Per Click) search result to visit a site, that click does cost the website owner. If competition for that particular keyphrase is quite high, and if you’re wanting a particular Google Adwords PPC ad to appear in a good position on page one of Google search results quite frequently, each click your ad receives could be quite costly.

What if it’s even hardly ever your target market that clicks your PPC ads? What if many of the people who click your PPC ads are your curious competitors, or SEO specialists and PPC campaign managers doing competitor research or other research, or website designers looking for inspiration for their next website design project, or online writers doing research for their next article?

People who have no intention of buying your products or using your services.

When these people click your Google PPC ad to visit your site, what is essentially happening is that you are paying money for people who have no intention of buying your products or using your services to visit your site!

Perhaps certain IP addresses can be blocked from clicking your PPC ads so that their click “doesn’t count,” but, as far as I know, this blocking usually applies to IP addresses from which many clicks are coming. Perhaps your competitors, or SEO specialists, website designers and writers only click your ads once or twice. Unfortunately you may have tons of competitors, and there are tons of SEO specialists, and there are tons of website designers and online writers, or even writers who don’t write online but who are doing their writing research online.

If these people visit your site after clicking a natural search result, they may still not be your target market, but at least you’re not paying for their visit.

For me, another advantage of a good natural SEO search result vs a good PPC search result is that if you don’t pay for your PPC ad campaign one month, of if your PPC budget runs out and you don’t replace it for one month, your ads won’t appear for one month, whereas your good natural search result has a good chance of staying there (for free!)

Many will argue that a good natural Search Engine Optimization campaign also has many disadvantages, and I agree, it does also have many disadvantages, but, for me, any disadvantages about natural SEO just fade away when I think of website owners paying for the clicks of visitors to their site, many of these visitors being people who are not interested in what the website owner has to offer or sell.

I am aware that Google Adwords PPC campaigns “do their job” for many, and that many website owners don’t mind paying for traffic to their websites, or are happy to choose to do so due to not wanting to add too much text to their sites, and I have nothing against these website owners.

This article is meant to assist those who cannot easily afford really good PPC campaigns, and to bring to their attention that many of their website visitors may not be interested in their products or services at all.

Picture this:

You’re a shop owner and your shop is positioned right next to the street. Business is quiet. You go out onto the sidewalk and stop a passerby, telling him you’re giving him $5 to come inside your shop. He tells you he is not interested in anything in your shop and that he doesn’t even have any money. You say “It doesn’t matter; here’s the $5 and please come in anyway.” And while he is inside your shop staring at the wall because he’s not interested in anything inside your shop, you’re still outside on the sidewalk looking for another uninterested person you’d like to give another $5 to.

If you convince 10 uninterested persons to come inside your shop, costing you $50 and one of them suddenly decides to spend $100, well done, but what if you spend $50 a day for 3 days doing this, and no sales are made?

It may be better, and worth it, to take the trouble and pay any costs involved, to paint your shop a new colour, make the outside more attractive, set up intriguing shop window displays, and widen the doorway so that people can easily see the great contents of your shop. This should attract people, and should reduce or eliminate the amount of cold and rainy days you need to stand outside offering people money to enter your shop.

© copyright Teresa Schultz 2011