The thought process around PPC vs. SEO makes the assumption that PPC and SEO are zero sum game where a click to a natural link is the same person that would have clicked on a paid link. BAD ASSUMPTION. The math doesn’t add up. Canceling one source of traffic may save money, but it will not result in growth. Why? Because at the end of the day, if you are getting 10,000 visits from PPC, then add 10,000 visits from seo, you are getting 20,000 visits.
PPC (10,000) + SEO (10,000) > SEO (10,000)
Any way you cut it, stopping PPC just because you are successful with SEO doesn’t necessarily result in anything other than losing your PPC traffic. The question is, will stopping PPC because of SEO success really help you? Most likely here’s what happens:
- The quality of your traffic goes up or down a little bit.
- You lose the traffic PPC contributes. Despite what a lot of SEOs claim, you get what you pay for in traffic. Free traffic isn’t always good traffic.
- Your sales probably will go down at least a little bit.
- Your boss, who learned his lesson when he killed the yellow pages when a radio campaign got leads for cheaper will either fire you or get to teach you a marketing lesson.
That’s it. Oh, and if you use content networks (ads on non-search websites) with Google, killing your PPC will 100% certainly result in reduced sales. Which brings me to Mike’s Law of Marketing:
NEVER EVER BUY INTO A CAMPAIGN WHERE WE ARE USING A SMALLER SAMPLE OF THE SAME MARKET AND COUNTING ON HAVING A BETTER CONVERSION RATE.
Why is this true? Because at the end of the day, if you don’t change the makeup of the market (i.e. better targeted demographics, change keywords) you rarely will get better sales. Why? Because your market is a big part of dictating your conversion rate. The old replace PPC with SEO scam usually breaks Mike’s Law: you aren’t changing your market – people still find you for the same keyword, except you shrunk your market because those PPC ads ran all the time, and on more sites than just Google’s search engine!
