What Gives You The Most Bang For Your Buck?
It seems the plethora of Online Marketing opportunity causes many business owners to struggle with how best to spend their marketing dollars. Its not surprising as the media are constantly bringing forward new ideas and notions as if they have any real overview knowledge on the subject, which with rare exceptions they don’t.
In the trenches it is obvious what works(SEO and Adwords), what doesn’t work(Twitter),what takes far too much time and investment to work(LinkedIn,Youtube and many others) and what priorities businesses need to be considering moving forward(SEO,Adwords,Facebook) in this dynamic Online Marketing world that we live in.
The reality is that as much as Online Marketing is dynamic, it has a very solid constant theme which has been around now for quite a while and has become established. I am talking about the 2 biggest elements that Your business website needs to put Your offering in front of Your customers, ie Search Engine Optimisation and Google Adwords Advertising. Both considerable traffic generators when leveraged properly, i don’t like using the word traffic because there are many websites purely focusing on untargeted traffic ie anybody on the internet today, i want to put my revolutionary new design of sunglasses in front of them in the expectation a percentage will bite. Rather than that approach which is the old fashioned media way(eg television,radio,yellow pages,newspaper classifieds and display) we focus on a very targeted approach to simply place a business in front of somebody directly looking for a business in that field, introducing customers to businesses as extremely warm leads. Both Adwords and SEO perform this function magnificently when setup correctly(most SEO and Adwords campaigns are run ham fisted at efficiency levels of 5-10% of what they could be).
So back to the original topic which gives you more bang for your Buck? SEO should have an impact within a month and have lasting impact for years, the sweet spot of ranking results should mature between 3 months and 6 months and continue to mature as time goes on(if campaigns are continued to be optimised) unless optimisation ceases in which case expect a stabilisation and eventually a drop. Effective Google Adwords management will allow immediate traction in running a campaign and spread over a vast number of keyword phrases. Over 6 months we would expect costs for an adwords campaign to slightly exceed costs for a typical SEO campaign but bring a very slightly higher level of converting client, and slightly higher numbers of unique visitors.
So to summarise, if you took a view over 6 months you would say Adwords gave you more bang for your buck, but over 12 months SEO would sustain similar if not greater traffic figures and likely cost less. of course there are many variables here from industry to amount of keywords that get trffic in an industry to the level of SEO campaign and most of all to the Quality of the Landing Pages……..do they convert, if adwords traffic is going to specialist high converting design landing pages and SEO is going to brochure type sales pages in the heart of the website then Adwords will blow SEO out of the water.
Bottom Line: Do Both if you can, each strategy will build your business and the extra tracking leverage as well as the closer understanding of how your customers behave online will take your business to the next level.
