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Investing in Pay Per Click Marketing or Search Engine By Optimization - a Company Decision
By Scott Buresh, Medium Blue (c) 2007

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.

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.

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.
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Scott Buresh is the founder and CEO of Medium Blue, which was 
recently named the number one  search engine optimization company 
(http://www.mediumblue.com/) 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 (http://www.mediumblue.com/
free-whitepaper.php), "Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix," for 
more insight.
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