The PPC market is massive business, and it’s getting bigger. Great news for Google, who seem to increase their monopoly on online advertising every day – not such great news for you the advertiser as you see your click costs rising up and up. At LeadGenerators, we’ve seen the cost of key phrases going up significantly over the last few years and, while it used to be common to find cheap 5p clicks, they are becoming increasingly rare. With costs of over £2 per click becoming a regular occurrence, the days of PP being a cheaper form of marketing is fading in to memory.

Although SEO used to be considered to be slow to get going (this is fast changing) the biggest advantage is that once the groundwork is done and solid rankings are obtained, you no longer pay for every click. Think of SEO and PPC like contract phones versus Pay as you Go: with the latter you pay for every minute you are on the phone, but with the former you can chat to your heart’s content, knowing that you’ve already paid your full amount for the month. For this reason, while SEO has an up front cost, it often ends up being significantly cheaper in the long run.

Because PPC can get so expensive, many people assign a daily budget to their spend. Once that limit has been hit (whether by 500 people clicking a 10p advert or 25 people clicking a £2 one), your presence on the search engine is over for the day, enabling your competitors to capitalise on your missed business. Because SEO traffic is free, you won’t suddenly drop from the rankings when you run out of cash, and you can benefit from the traffic 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. And who knows what extra conversions you could get in that previously dead time – it could provide a whole new world of profitability!

It’s widely accepted that the main reason PPC costs are rising is because so many people are opening PPC accounts, driving competition for already competitive key phrases even higher. However, there are fewer people investing in SEO than in PPC. According to SEMPO, last year USA companies spent an accumulated $1.3 Billion on SEO, compared to $9.1 Billion on PPC. To break down that data, that’s 87% of budget to PPC and 11% to SEO (with the remaining 2% on other miscellaneous areas). If fewer people are investing in SEO, then you still have a much better chance of climbing aboard the SEO bandwagon before it becomes as crowded as the good ship ‘paid search’. To put it simply: less competition means that in the long run you will have to pay less to rank well!

The beauty of an SEO campaign is that although it can take longer than PPC to get going, the results are longer lasting and this success is often self replicating. One of the key elements of good rankings is that of acquiring good quality inbound links. A full SEO program should include a viral links element and this, by its very nature of being viral, should continue to produce links for you which, in turn, contributes to your rankings – helping to keep your ongoing SEO spend lower.

Overlooking the fact that there are some people who never click Pay Per Click ads (I used to be one of these people before I started working in online marketing!), its a fact that fewer people even bother to look at PPC ads than the natural listings.

Eyetools has produced an interesting heatmap which shows where people’s eyes go on a standard Google search. Here are their findings as to what percentage of people see (let alone click) each entry in both the organic and paid listings:

As you can see, having a top listing on the PPC side of the search engines page for a keyphrase will get you the same number of eyeballs as an entry 6th or 7th in the organic rankings – but at a much higher cost. Dropping down to 5th spot in the paid side, and you’re actually being seen by less people than any of the organic results on the page. Add into this the fact that some people have an inherent distrust for paid results, and there’s a good portion of search engine users you can never reach if you insist on ignoring SEO. By reaching out to them through SEO you are potentially cashing in on a much higher return on investment from PPC alone.

It is still really all about your online marketing mix and what percentage of your online budget is dedicated to PPC versus SEO. Times are changing, and PPC is not the free-for-all of cheap online marketing that it once was. Today, SEO not only provides longer term results, but can certainly give PPC a good run for its money and as a result it now deservers to get a greater piece of the online marketing pie.