Organic Search vs. PPC?

Should you invest in Pay Per Click (PPC) or organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? This is a very big question and to a lot organisations the answer will be both but all too often the wrong decision or balance is made between the two. We will try and discuss this topic by looking at an example. One of our customers had a large online marketing budget and they purely allocated this to PPC which did bring in good results. When we were asked to evaluate the website we discovered a whole lost market. When google displayed results you only spotted this company in the sponsored results which meant every person arriving at the website came at a click cost dependent on the keywords. They appeared out of the top 5 pages of natural results for all search terms. We also found a considerable cost in the whole process of finding keywords to bid against and allocating budgets. What we proposed was to move 25% of the PPC budget to organic SEO for a period of 6 months. We deemed 6 months as a realistic measurement time frame to cope with natural peaks/troughs in the business. Before starting a detailed report was created of existing success rates and website analytics. This was the marker to compare against. After just 3 months we started to see the website appear on the top 3 pages of the search engines and our analytics started to show a considerable growth in visitors. After the 6 months were up the findings showed that organic visitors now accounted for the majority of web site visitors. We discovered that given the same company in sponsored and organic results people tended to click on the organic results, this accounted for the reduction in PPC visitors. The actual closure ratio (visitor to sale) was equal to that in the original PPC only campaign. This meant that sales had increased due to more visitors. Based on these findings the decision was made to reduce the online marketing budget by 40% then allocate this new reduced value 50/50 between PPC and organic SEO. This is proving very successful in more sales and also at a lower overall cost to the business. In conclusion we strongly believe a place for both methods of search but would recommend all website owners to first prepare a marketing plan that shows how to achieve good organic sesrch and then allocate a budget to PPC.  Organic search is long term website growth whilst PPC is shorter term results driven.