If you’re like most consultants, you have a website. And, if your website is like most consultants’ websites, it’s just sitting there, getting very little traffic. And when you look for it on Google, you have dig pretty deep to find it. This can be pretty discouraging (not to mention not very helpful for your business).
Now, I’m sure you are a fantastic consultant. You’re clearly an expert in your niche or you wouldn’t be out there running a consulting business to share that expertise.
But just because you know your stuff doesn’t mean people can find you easily on the web. To make that happen, you need to find a way to get your website to rank highly on some of your main keywords.
And when that’s your goal, there are two main approaches you can take: SEO or PPC.
I’m sure you’ve heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and you may also have heard of PPC (Pay Per Click). You’ve probably also heard one marketing wizard or another opining that you should be doing one, or the other, or both of these to grow your business.
Today, I’d like to examine this topic generally and give you my thoughts about which approach is best for you to employ in your business, when to employ it, and why. In future posts, I’ll get down to a more detailed analysis, but today’s all about the big picture.
Now, before I launch into this topic, I just want to be transparent. Over the years, I’ve learned a decent amount about SEO, and I’m continuing to learn more, but I know a lot less about PPC.
So, what I’m sharing in this post about PPC comes more from research than experience. I’ll be launching some PPC campaigns in the coming months and I’ll let you know what I learn. But never fear, the information about PPC in this post all comes from very reliable sources, so you can count on it being accurate.
OK, with that said, let’s dig into this a bit. First, SEO.
SEO: The Pros
Here’s a quick definition: Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing the pages on your website so that they appear as highly as possible in the organic search results on Google and other search engines.
To do so, you need to know:
- what keywords and keyword phrases your intended audience is searching for,
- which keywords have higher search volume, and
- which keywords have higher or lower competition (the number of other pages on the Internet using the same keywords).
Armed with this information (and there are some great tools out there to give you this information), you can devise a strategy for writing your content to incorporate the best keywords in the right places on your pages, ultimately resulting in higher page ranking.
The details of how to go about implementing this process is beyond the scope of today’s post (we’ll dig more deeply into it in future posts). For now, let’s just look at the major pros and cons of using SEO.
First, the pros:
- Building Credibility and Your Brand—If your site shows up regularly in the organic search results when your ideal clients are searching for related keywords, they will start to think, “Hmmm, this site just keeps showing up. This person must be really good.” As a result, they’re more likely to remember you, bookmark your site, and return in the future.
- Increasing Traffic—Obviously, the higher your site ranks in organic search, the more eyeballs are going to see it, the more people are going to click on it, and the more traffic you’ll have. This will give you, through your website content, the opportunity to sell your visitors on hiring you.
- Lower Cost—I don’t say “No cost” because, even if you do all the SEO work yourself, there’s still the value of your time and the opportunity cost of not working on something else. But even if you hire an SEO expert to help you with this (which will usually cost a few thousand bucks), that’s still low in comparison to running PPC ads with a marketing budget.
- Sustainability—Unlike traffic that comes from ads, organic traffic from SEO won’t disappear in a flash. Even in lean times when you don’t have money to pump into ads, your organic traffic can sustain your business.
- Improved Click-Through Rate—Even though paid ads show up at the top of the page in search results, many people skip right over them because they trust organic results more, knowing that the page actually earned its position instead of just paying for it. This results in more people clicking on the organic returns than on ads.
- Breadth of Rankings—Even if you also do PPC in conjunction with your SEO efforts, you’re not going to want to pay for ads on a whole lot of search terms. More likely, you’ll buy ads on just a few main keywords that are a good value. But you can still rank well on many other search terms in the organic rankings if you do a good job with your SEO.
SEO: The Cons
OK, after reading the section above, SEO is probably sounding pretty good, right? And it really does offer some major advantages. But it’s not all unicorns and puppy dogs. There are some drawbacks to SEO, too. Here are the main ones:
- Slow Movement—It sometimes takes a while for you to get decent upward movement through your SEO efforts.
- You Might Not Be Able to Compete for Some Keywords—Depending on what your main keywords are, you may have little competition or a lot of competition. Heaven help you if the keywords you want to compete on are used by Amazon or eBay. But, even if this is the case, you can often find related “long-tail” keyword phrases that you can compete on. You just have to put in the work to find them and then revise your site content to incorporate them.
- Content is King, But Developing Content Takes Time—The more pages of good, relevant content you have on your site, the better it will rank in search. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time and work to build up that content. If you can’t afford a content marketer (most independent consultants don’t have that kind of budget), you’ll have to produce this content yourself, either by writing a regular blog, doing regular videos on a vlog, posting content on a YouTube channel linked to your site, doing a regular podcast linked on your site, etc.
So, as you can see, while there are some major advantages of SEO, there are also some significant challenges.
Next, let’s look at the PPC option.
PPC: The Pros
Again, as with SEO, let’s start by defining what Pay Per Click (PPC) is. According to Wikipedia, PPC is “an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a search engine).”
Why would you want to pay to drive traffic to your site when SEO does it for (nearly) free?
There are a number of reasons. Here are the big advantages of paying for ads for your main keywords:
- Top of the Page Positioning—You can pay to show up in the top few spots on page one for your search term. Usually the top three or four results are paid ads. It’s very difficult to achieve a page one ranking through SEO only.
- More Real Estate and More Varied Real Estate—Not only can you land at or near the top of the search page, you can do more in that territory if you’ve paid for the privilege. You can include phone numbers, links, pricing, and bullet points. Also, if your site has products for sale, you can have a visual ad showing your product, which also boosts the click-through rate.
- Budget—Yes, you have to pay for your ads, but with Google ads, you can set a budget for your marketing and set a specified ad spend limit per day. When you reach that limit, your ads don’t show up until the next ad spend kicks in. This gives you control over how much you spend on PPC.
- Speed—Whereas it might take months to move up significantly in the search rankings using SEO, you can roll out an ad campaign and be atop the rankings in a few weeks. Not only that, you can try different variations of your ad and get data telling you what works best. You can then pivot on a dime and run with the best approach.
PPC: The Cons
OK, those are some strong selling points for PPC, but, as with SEO, it’s not all good news.
Let’s look at the downside:
- Cost—The obvious drawback is that you have to pay for the ads, and some of the keywords you’d like to rank for may be expensive.
- No Pay, No Traffic—If you’re getting most of your traffic from PPC ads and you decide to stop running the ads (or can no longer afford to), your traffic can dry up overnight, whereas traffic from organic search boosted by SEO is more stable.
- Copycats—It’s pretty easy for a competitor to copy what you’re doing and steal your traffic away. They can see your ad and steal your wording. They can click through and see your landing page and your offer. If they think what you’re doing will work better for them than what they’re currently doing, you’ll probably see an ad show up right next to yours that is like a clone of your approach. And there’s really nothing you can do about this.
The Answer to Our Original Question
Alright, where does the analysis above leave us? Our original question was whether it was better to try to boost your site’s ranking through SEO or PPC.
And the answer to that question is…
It depends.
I know, I know. You were probably looking for a clear-cut answer to give you some direction.
But it really does depend on a lot of factors, including whether you need an immediate boost in traffic or can afford to build it up more slowly; whether you have (or are willing to fund) a marketing budget; how much content you currently have and whether or not you have a content marketing plan in place to produce more over the coming months, etc.
Now, I have a confession to make. There IS a third option. So let’s take a look at that now…
SEO AND PPC
I admit that the title of this post was a bit misleading, as it set the discussion up as an either/or situation. I did that for a reason, and that reason is that most people view it that way. They think you have to choose one or the other. But that’s not the case.
You see, you can tap into some of the strengths of each approach and use those strengths to mitigate the weaknesses of the other approach.
For example, you can run a PPC ad or two on a few of your main keywords to get a quick spike in traffic while you slowly build up your site content and work on your organic rankings.
Plus, when you use PPC, you get feedback on which headlines, what content, and what offers are working better than others, and you can then plow that information into your SEO efforts.
And it’s even possible that you’ll find yourself on page one of the search results multiple times—once with your ad and one or more times with your organic rankings. And that would do wonders for your branding and credibility, not to mention your traffic.
Done thoughtfully, you can improve your traffic with only a modest ad spend.
Which Comes First?
Now, you may be thinking, “I don’t have the time, energy, or money to tackle both of these approaches at the same time. What should I do?”
I realize that many of you may be in this situation. And again, I have to answer that, if you can only do one or the other right now, it really does depend on a lot of factors. You need to look at your specific business and your business goals, weigh all the pros and cons I’ve presented in this post, and make your choice.
But I will take a stab at a generic recommendation.
If it’s just not clear-cut and you can’t make up your mind, I would recommend focusing on SEO first in conjunction with consistent content creation over a period of time to improve your organic search ranking.
Then, when things are looking good there, start learning the ins and outs of PPC and introduce a small ad spend to the mix (this is best done when you have a new product or service to offer) to give you a quick boost in traffic.
Conclusion
I hope this has been a helpful overview of the SEO vs. PPC debate. Both approaches really can help make your business more visible, drive more traffic to your website, and ultimately generate more consulting gigs or sales.
In upcoming posts, I’ll dig a little deeper into the “how to” of these traffic-building approaches.
And if you’d like to look into the possibility of having an SEO expert revise your website to give it a boost in the organic search rankings, check out our SEO writing services. We’d be happy to help.
Good luck!
