Revenue and spending both affect the bottom line of a company. So, it is wise to carefully consider how you spend your online marketing budget. It may seem like a logical approach to choose Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or a pay-per-click advertising campaign. But when it comes right down to it, is that really a good idea?

A word about SEO

SEO is important, because you want people to be able to find your website without have to pay for all of your traffic. However, SEO takes time. You have to generate content, identify valuable keywords and phrases, refine your content to use those words strategically while still making sense to your human visitors. You also have to work on increasing the amount of quality inbound links to your website. You may need changes to your page layouts (if you have too many ads and not enough content above the fold) or update your HTML code to make it easier for web bots to read.

If you have the time and patience, you could do all of this work yourself. Even then, you’ll have to wait (possibly months) for the search engines to take notice. Is it worth the effort?

Yes! Aside from increasing website traffic, improving your content and refining your message is important. Your visitors should be able to read any page on your website and clearly discern the purpose of that webpage and how it relates to your overall business message. And, over time, you should be able to decrease the amount you need to invest in pay-per-click advertising to bring new business to your website.

A word about Pay-Per-Click Advertising

There are a number of legitimate reasons to launch a pay-per-click ad campaign for your website. We’ve already touched on one good reason; SEO takes time and attention and your business may need new leads now. Here is another good reason to look at pay-per-click ads:

Website Quality: Let’s say that you have a website and are quite satisfied with the content. Your clients tell you that they like it. The information is clear and easy to find. Many businesses are better served by a simple website than one that has been bloated beyond proportion to rank better for certain keywords. You may never see the first page of Google or Yahoo! for your desired keyword, but you don’t need to if you have a paid advertising campaign.

That’s not to say you’re a slave to a $1,000/month budget for pay-per-click ads. If you let us manage your pay-per-click ad campaign, we can streamline the ad process (from the keywords, to designing the ads, to refining your landing pages) so that you can spend less on your ad campaign and still get the leads you need.

Our recommendation

We recommend a strategy that incorporates both, SEO and pay-per-click. While you’re waiting for your page rank to improve from SEO, you can bring in needed traffic with pay-per-click campaigns. Over time, you can reduce your spending on pay-per-click campaigns, because you’re paying attention to your SEO. Using the two together is a very effective method for driving traffic to your website and generating qualified leads.