The New York Post released an article detailing the lack of many companies
Most executives, with little regard to how well their companies fare in the more important natural search results… …overspend on paid search because it is the one area of the search market they understand.
Aside from concerns for the relationship between the news source and the reporting agency, their is important information that is addressed:
Executives know the battleground for business success today is being fought on the search engine but they know very little about how well their companies are faring on natural search or if their paid search advertising dollars are well spent
Search Engine Marketing, advertising on search related products, is very valuable.
Search Engine Optimization, ranking high in search engine results, is also very valuable, but not as easy to achieve or measure.
Think of SEM as buying food at the grocery store and SEO as growing your own food. Either way you are providing for your needs and are a means to an end, but the difficulty is the time and energy spent. If you are engaged in online commerce, I think that SEM is a necessary evil, however, SEO can become a source of renewable energy for the long term.
What are your thoughts?
Do you consider the long-term effects of SEO as a valuable means and should be considered?
Do you think that SEM is not valuable?
Related Posts >>
- Google Out to Destroy Keyword Estimation Tools?
- Happy New Year 2008 – SEOpittfall 2007 in Review
- Search Engine Land is Open for Business
- MSN Offers Another Great Tool – Live Search Box
- AOL – Building a Better Search Portal?
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
SEO is absolutely required; it’s much cheaper to maintain than SEM, although the initial outlay can be immense. A significant problem that I see, from the corporate point of view, is that there’s a learning curve before you can choose and evaluate an effective SEO strategy or partner. The corresponding curve for SEM is much lower, and any moron can look at a report on an SEM campaign and decide if it’s cost effective; something that’s utterly untrue for SEO.
It seems that good metrics are still wanted, too, but we’ll get there as an industry.
Ranter,
Thanks for the comment.
I would tend to agree with you. The initial outlay for a website owner is more in regards to time and effort, however, it does take more than a “moron” to make a SEM campaign successful. In fact, many of the aspects of SEO can and should be applied to SEM to achieve the best results.
We have noticed that as users start to use search they are unable to articulate a PPC from natural search. First page is just as vital as either but experienced search users still perfer and dominate natural search.
Natural search is complex but the return is greater.
theseoagency
I think you should always use both seo & sem. If you have a large web site seo can have better results than sem.
Tim and Meble,
Thank you for your comments.
As many in the SEM industry can plainly see, aspects of SEO have trickled into the search marketing landscape.
Tim, I would tend to agree with you about natural search. As a (engine classified) super user, I tend to lean towards the natural listings, however, when searching for a product, I will click on marketer’s links.
Keep up the good work SEOs, and look for us in the top-ten if you are only using SEM!
I feel both are as important as each other, PPC can help to bring targetted visitors to your site while long term SEO is getting you onto page 1 in the natural listings, once this is achieved you can pull back on the PPC and save on your SEM costs, then if anything disasterous should happen like a major change in Google algorythm the PPC can step up again until things are back on track.
I do find that people are more inclined to trust natural listings rather than sponsored listings but each have their place.
Tony,
Thanks for the comment. Advertising, whether it be ppc, cpm, or others, are very important and I feel that they will not go away, however, you should have a balance of each. If you overlook one or the other, you are not getting the full benefit from your marketing program.
While it is known that more users will click organic results in comparison to paid ads, businesses with decent budgets should be looking at both PPC and SEO as part of their online marketing strategy and learn how the two pieces interconnect. Taking your analogy further, PPC allows the shopper to figure out what foods work best with their diet and lifestyle, making better decisions on what they should be growing and producing (the SEO strategy) for long-term health and well being.
If a company wants to rank well organically for a competitive keyword, a well crafted PPC campaign can provide data not only into search volumes and keyword variations but also give the company time and insight into how to fine tune their pages and content, so that organic an SEO strategies can have more likelihood of success. Note that I’m making an assumption here that PPC campaigns are using traditional components of their web site for their paid strategy – versus landing pages built exclusively for conversions (outside of the traditional website structure).
Conversely, it may become apparent that a keyword strategy, originally sought after, does not resonate in PPC with the prospected customers/visitors. If conversion rates are poor on a consistent basis, there may be less reason to exhaust time and efforts in working on an organic search strategy.
Thanks for linking to the article, it was an interesting read!
I actually had the benefit of meeting a CEO that wanted SEO first and the rest of SEM second. It was a good plan, they quickly closed done their competition on natural search terms and then used SEM to eat into there market share. Nice way of doing it.
In my opinion better SEO is better like SEM
SEO is enough
maybe SEM are more natural.. but
if you have good CMS
for me it works very good