Pay Per Click Versus SEO: Slow but Steady Wins the Race!

“The hare soon left the tortoise far behind and, confident of winning, he decided to take a nap midway through the course. When he awoke, he found his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, he had already won the race”

How many times have you jumped the gun and found out it would have been better to take the slower approach? I know I have, a million times to be (not) exact. I still get tempted by the “Get there now!” approach because I’ve always seen patience as a form of self torture. However, I’ve seen the results that SEO produces and they are phenomenal.

Compared to SEO, Adwords is great if a business is looking to generate traffic immediately and it’s good for short term (and long term if you can make a return). However, in order to increase brand awareness, and ultimately sales; SEO is what you’re looking for. I’m not sure if all SEO teams are like our team here at LTSEO but for us, an SEO campaign is a long term marketing strategy, partnering with businesses and not only improving rankings but direct bottom line.

Adwords can be expensive and the price isn’t fixed so it’s said to be quite a costly ‘learning curve’. On the other hand, SEO is a fixed monthly price whether you’re getting 50 visits to your site per day or 1000. A couple of businesses that are clients of ours were originally doing SEO themselves, however, they found it to be quite a time consuming process you have to ask yourself “what is my time worth?”, and further “am I even doing the right thing?”.

There are risks with both Adwords and SEO, so it is important to do your research before you start giving away your money. I was reading an article on Click fraud the other day and was quite shocked with what was said. Surprisingly, there are actually people out there who start websites and become publishers of Adwords and undetectably click those Ads to generate revenue – sad but true. Don’t get me wrong, there are scammers in the SEO industry as well. One of our current clients was burnt by an SEO company who were offering first page rankings within 2 weeks for 10 keywords at a pretty hefty price. There’s no way that 10 keywords can be on page one within two weeks, unless they’re simply just throwing you into Adwords or ranking you for a very low traffic, low competition keyword like ‘Pink Socks with Blue Polka Dots Gold Coast’ – Either that or their participating in some very nasty black hat SEO techniques.

Some Black Hat SEO Techniques:
Hidden Content
Meta Keyword Stuffing
Doorway or Gateway Pages
Link Farming
Cloaking

It is important to beware of Black Hat SEO because it can ultimately result in your website being completely kicked out of Google’s Index. The internet just like the real world has its fair share of scammers so it’s essential to be cautious and understand what you’re getting into. Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to counteract any suspected scams that SEO companies might be throwing at you – click here to get it straight from the horse’s mouth.

If you’re directly asking me “what is best for your internet marketing campaign?” I’d say both – SEO and Adwords can facilitate each other. Adwords can stimulate traffic growth in the short term and SEO can progressively saturate your industry providing authority, branding, exposure and most importantly more dime for your dollar.

“The Hare started out strong, speeding through the competition, whereby the tortoise slowly but methodologically won the race.”