As click costs rise, many companies who are already investing in active pay per click marketing campaigns
are looking toward hiring a search engine optimization company to supplement their marketing portfolio in
order to increase their exposure and reduce their advertising spend. In some cases, frustrated by click fraud
and increasing click costs, marketers are using search engine optimization to completely replace pay per click
marketing. However, these companies will often try to evaluate search engine optimization using the same
methodology that they had used for pay per click - by figuring out the cost per click.
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In almost every case, a campaign created by a reputable search engine optimization company will eventually garner
lower per-click costs than pay per click marketing for any industry. Yet using cost per click to compare the
effectiveness of these two separate disciplines is comparing apples to, well, anything other than apples. The
crucial difference between these two approaches is that pay per click marketing is more of an advertising investment,
while search engine optimization is more appropriately likened to an investment in infrastructure. While both have
their merits in terms of increasing a company's online exposure, it is important to understand the differences in the
respective investments and to determine why cost per click is not a fair indicator of the performance of a search engine
optimization company.
Pay Per Click Marketing
Advertising investments of all kinds, from billboards to print ads to television spots to pay per click marketing,
all share a common trait. They exist in the public eye for as long as a company is willing to pay for them. Stop
paying, and they disappear. True, a print ad may continue to exist for a while after it runs (until the newspaper
or magazine gets recycled, at least), and a television spot may get attention if it wins any awards (or winds up
on YouTube). But a pay per click marketing campaign will simply vanish as soon as the budget is cut. This means that
when a company reduces its advertising spend in this arena, it loses all of its exposure immediately.
What does this really mean? Well, for one, it means that figuring out the average per-click costs of a pay per click
marketing campaign makes sense because everything happens in real time. A pay per click campaign will begin nearly
instantly after a company signs up and pays, and it will vanish just as quickly when the company ceases payment. In
other words, there is a clear delineation of when a campaign begins and when it ends.
This delineation is important, because it excludes many other potential factors that muddy the waters when you try to
apply this same ROI analysis to a campaign created by a search engine optimization company.
Search Engine Optimization
As said previously, utilizing a search engine optimization company can be likened to making an investment in
the infrastructure of a business rather than an investment in advertising. This is because with search engine
optimization, there is no clear delineation of where the benefit from the campaign ends. If a business stops
paying its search engine optimization company at any point after the campaign has been launched (presuming they
have hired a decent search engine optimization company), there will continue to be results from that campaign
for an extended period of time - usually many months or even years.
Of course, it is not recommended that any business actually quit an ongoing SEO campaign because a good search
engine optimization company will always be expanding and honing that campaign over time to make it more successful
over the long term. However, budgets get revisited and revised. Decision makers can change. And if the budget for
SEO does get cut, a business will continue to see results for long after. How, then, can you determine value on a
per-click basis? The simple answer is that you can't.
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It should be noted that while maintaining ongoing results after payments have ceased is a big upside to search
engine optimization, the inverse downside is that an effective campaign put in place by a search engine optimization
company can take some time to implement, and the results may not appear for weeks or months. A search engine
optimization campaign takes patience, effort, and, most of all, time. If a business needs its marketing campaign
to be up and running immediately, pay per click marketing is going to be a better short-term choice.
Conclusion
It is important to recognize the innate differences in pay per click campaigns and search engine optimization when
trying to quantify results. A pay per click marketing campaign can have a definitive beginning and end, which makes
cost per click a good way of determining ROI. Yet the results gained from hiring a search engine optimization company,
although an SEO campaign can take much longer to implement, will outlast the results from a pay per click campaign if
a business ever needs to cut spending. And this is where the notion of analyzing the effectiveness of a search engine
optimization campaign on a cost per click basis breaks down.
About The Author
Scott Buresh is the founder and CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named
the number one search engine optimization
company in the world by PromotionWorld. Scott's articles have appeared in
numerous publications, including ZDNet, WebProNews, MarketingProfs, DarwinMag,
SiteProNews, SEO Today, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a
contributor to Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004).
Medium Blue is an Atlanta search engine optimization company with local and
national clients, including Boston Scientific, Cirronet, and DS Waters.
Download Medium Blue's
latest exclusive whitepaper, "Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix,"
for more insight.
