And now it’s PPC coming into the ring… he is looking ready to rumble! Pumping his fists, he’s showing off to the audience – looking to the left, to the right, and – wait, what’s that!? The crowd is going wild! PPC just straight out dissed SEO, who’s in the other corner, looking ready to strike! I tell ya, folks, I haven’t seen a rivalry this bitter since the great Northeastern College of Computer and Information Science Star Wars vs. Lord of the Rings debate of ’07! Well, maybe more bitter than that, actually… the point is, PPC and SEO may be siblings, but their contention with one another can run deep. Danny helps us sort out the strife and bring this band of brothers together (and actually keeps his bias out of it, kind of!). Don’t forget to use your nails, boys!
Okay. So, PPC and SEO, the thing I’m talking about, of course, is what you see on search engine result pages. You’ll see on the top and on the right in the United States are ads. You’re going to pay for those. Those are what I am referring to when I talk about PPC, pay-per-click. SEO, search engine optimization, will be the rest of the page. Both of these, you know, they’re two different channels for marketing. They’re trying to accomplish the same goal. They’re both trying to drive traffic to a specific thing. Whenever you are looking at two different channels of the same thing, it’s important to figure out what are the pros, what are the cons, what are the strengths, and what are the weaknesses. How can these work together? When is it more appropriate to use one rather than the other? Let me talk about the pros and cons of PPC and SEO.
The cons of PPC are really, really long, but I had to simplify it so I could fit it on the whiteboard here. With PPC, it starts really quickly. So, if you want to be showing up in Google for example, you can create an ad campaign and in the same day your ads will be showing up. It’s also a lot easier to measure than SEO. In fact, this is something I’m envious of PPCers. While I can use analytics and stuff, it gets complicated to try to measure SEO because you cast such a wide net. Whereas PPC, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and everyone else have built some great interfaces. They’ve done some great things. So it’s a lot easier to measure your direct ROI on PPC.
The downside to PPC is that it cost a lot of money as compared to traditional SEO. You’re going to pay for every single click that comes through. That’s going to add up over time. In case you don’t know, it works on an auction system, so you’re going to pay more for more competitive keywords, which is not necessarily the same system with SEO.
With SEO it has a slower start-up. So, in fact, SEO can take a long time to start working. But it is essentially free. Once you do it once, it is in place and assuming best practices don’t change, which they usually don’t, it’s going to build on itself over time. The start-up cost is slower. It costs you less money, and it builds on itself over time. By that, I mean, with SEO if you get a link from The New York Times for example, that link’s going to help you for the lifetime of the link. If you run an ad with PPC, an ad that ran a year ago is not necessarily going to help you. To be fair, it could, you could argue it could help you from a branding perspective, but not in the same way that a mention in The New York Times would and actually give you direct link to and help you rank higher in Google.
On to the major contention points. This is where it gets a little bit more fun. The first one is budgets. PPC and SEO are generally put in marketing departments in companies. It varies of course. That means that they need to fight each other for budgets, along with all the other marketing channels. So, this is where I see the biggest contention. I think generally people realize that PPC and SEO are trying to accomplish the same thing — drive traffic. But PPC costs a lot more money up front. SEO costs a lot more money down the road to get these big initiatives through.
The next one is dev resources. Admittedly, SEO is much more dev heavy or development resource heavy than PPC. You could technically run a PPC campaign without any developers. But if you want to be creative and a better person, you could do SEO, and you’re going to need the help of developers. With marketing resources, people who are writing the ad copy and the people who are planning what the campaigns are going to be, it’s going to take more of your traditional markers, marketers to do that. Not markers. Although markers, you do use markers. So that could work. See that made sense. It did.
Lastly are the conflicting best practices. This is actually where when I am working with people at SEOmoz this is where we butt heads. With things like, especially when it comes to tracking, tracking parameters, this can be one of the biggest pros of PPC. It is really, really easy to measure. Part of that is implementing things that are not best practices for SEO, be it URL parameters or putting in a lot of duplicate content so you can test lots of different landing pages or be it keywords, keyword cannibalization. A lot of times you’ll be targeting the exact same words with your PPC campaigns as your SEO campaigns. That’s a good thing usually, because you want to dominate the entire SERP. But it also means that you can run into keyword cannibalization issues where pages you don’t necessarily want to rank organically start to. Don’t worry. I’ll talk about how to work with some of those things.
That brings us right into the tips for playing nice. The first one I think is probably the most important. Understand that you’re both working on the same team and that you need to unify your message. I said already, this will be my third time, you’re both trying to drive traffic. Make sure you are using similar phrases and that you’re trying to get to the same end goal when you’re doing this.
That segues nicely into the other one, which is learn each other’s jobs. I’ve actually learned a lot about SEO by trying to understand PPC. The same thing goes the other way around. Someone who knows a lot about PPC can learn a lot about improving their quality score by learning SEO basic best practices.
Share research and win. There are two important points here. The research. The first one that comes to mind is most of the SEO keyword research I do is through PPC tools. If you’re both trying to target the same words, it would make a lot of sense just to share that data. If you’re seeing words in SEO, like organic listings convert really well, you should probably tell your PPC person that as well. It’s just going to help the company as a whole.
The second one is share wins. Some days you’re going to have SEO wins. Some days you’re going to have PPC wins. It’s important to celebrate each other’s wins. You’re going for the same goal here. Plus, you get to celebrate more. If you’re at SEOmoz, this might be a Champagne Wednesday or something, right? The more you can drink in the office, the better. Share your wins. I highly recommend it.
This one over here is design campaigns together. I don’t necessarily mean have your SEO writing copy for your PPC campaign. I do mean talk about implementation. How are these landing pages going to be structured on the site? What are they going to look like? Are they nofollow? Are they blocked by robots.txt. What general ideas are you trying to target? The same thing with SEO. What message are we conveying through this URL structure? How is it going to affect quality score? Important things like that. Just make sure that multiple people working on these two different channels are working together when planning these different campaigns.
Number five is understand each channel’s strengths and weakness. So, PPC for example is great because it can be very temporal. If you want to get an ad up today and be what looks like ranking for something, which it’s really not, you can do it day of. It you just want to spend a lot of money, you can rank number one for whatever it is you want depending on your budget. Whereas SEO, you can’t do that. SEO, on the other hand, it will take you a lot longer, but for relatively low budgets you can rank competitively for high term. We see a lot of startups do this. They’ll have a great SEO campaign. They’ll do great content. They’ll start ranking for ridiculously competitive things. Mint.com did this originally. Their blog ranks extremely well for personal finance related things. They have a lot of great marketing channels, but SEO is one of the ones that really kicked butt and saved them, at least I’m assuming here, saved them a lot of money because they didn’t have to pay for the PPC ads, although they did on the side. But they didn’t need to. They drive a lot of traffic organically.
The last one is be liberal with rel=canonical and meta robots. This is more from an SEO perspective. By this I mean rel=canonical, if you’re going to have lots of URL parameters that show up a lot on blogs for tracking things, be liberal with this. Use it as much as you can. At SEOmoz, we’re trying to get it implemented on every single page so that if someone has a bunch of parameters through our URLs, it will always go back to one canonical version.
The second part of this is meta robots. There are very, very few cases where you should ever use robots.txt to block a page because you’re just creating a black hole in your website and you’re wasting links. But with landing pages for PPC it make a lot of sense to noindex them so they don’t start competing against pages that are SEO driven, but you should share the link value within them. So, using a follow. There’d be a meta robots noindex follow.
I think that’s all I got, other than PPCers are big dum-dum heads. I invite you to share your own video clips explaining the other perspective of this. I appreciate your time. I’ll see you next week on Whiteboard Friday. Thank you.
Mini Update: Peter Sargent from simplyhealth.co.uk put together an excellent summary of the benefits and weaknesses of SEO and PPC which is very useful for explaining this subject to curious co-workers. You can download the SEO and PPC PDF here.
If you have any tips or tricks that you’ve learned along the way, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!
