Why Organic SEO Beats PPC

[LookItsMeTerryG]

Originally Posted by Daniel Molano

Is that why you're posting on Terry's thread under a different username, impersonating a newbie? Are you guys working together?

We can track IP addresses you know, and so can Moderators.

Yeah, I don't appreciate the UFC condescending reference.

Guys, Mr. Mac has been BSing his way through this entire thread. You will soon notice a banned sign under his user name.

Working together? No sir, I talked to Mac on the phone a few weeks back when I first started my SEO guy thread. We chatted about some local stuff, after him seeing me mention it in there. Haven't talked since then, except for an email I sent him to touch base about a week ago.

Also, what would be the benefit of us working together? This isn't a sales thread or anything. Actually, he just replied in my SEO guy thread too.

[LookItsMeTerryG]

Wait, I just looked, where do you see him under a different username impersonating a newbie?

[MacFreddie]

Originally Posted by Daniel Molano

Is that why you're posting on Terry's thread under a different username, impersonating a newbie? Are you guys working together?

We can track IP addresses you know, and so can Moderators.

Yeah, I don't appreciate the UFC condescending reference.

Guys, Mr. Mac has been BSing his way through this entire thread. You will soon notice a banned sign under his user name.

Daniel, are you serious? C'mon bud, don't get so defensive.

I've talked on the phone with Terry for several hours previously, he's a great guy.

Terry doesn't need my help nor anyone else, he is very successful without any input from anyone.

What I told you was True, no BS.

I told you before I respect what you have done with your SEO skills, but I have to give Terry credit also. Terrys been doing SEO for almost 10 years and has Fortune 500 companies as clients.

My point was this, If I gave Terry my inside secret about getting to #1 in less than 72 hours, then yes, it would be like Lessnar vs Mir.

And vice-versa if I gave it to you.

I have tremendous respect for both of you.

Chill out man.

Sincerely,

Mac

[LookItsMeTerryG]

How do you know mac and NTN are the same person? I looked in my thread and both profiles and saw no indication of that. I dont' even think it really matters in the long run, I'm not selling anything, neither is he. There's nothing to be gained here by doing so.

[Daniel Molano]

Anyway, this is not even an SEO methodology debate. Let's get back on track.

I really have to go now, but I'll be back later.

[Universal_Soul]

but there is still good 'ol Emelianenko out there....

[Universal_Soul]

and I think you both guys Terry and Mac should share your secrets with me, as I'm a good man and a lot of people would be happier thanks to the goods I sell..... The more the better I'd say.

[LookItsMeTerryG]

Originally Posted by Universal_Soul

and I think you both guys Terry and Mac should share your secrets with me, as I'm a good man and a lot of people would be happier thanks to the goods I sell..... The more the better I'd say.

Hey man, I never claimed to have any secrets! I'd be glad to help you out though, I'm available via phone or msn. Just pm me your info.

[smoothii]

Daniel, I find your post very inspirational after learning that it took you only 1yr and 3 months to get that kind of traffic or rather that successful at seo.

My question is where did you learn your seo? I'm assuming it was a combination of many things but what was your main education?

Rina

[MSGeek]

Originally Posted by Daniel Molano

But anyway, I will not continue this debate until someone brings their own rankings to the table.

Really? How, for example, about my argument of using PPC to quickly test a niche before investing time and money into the site, content, SEO, and, potentially, even a product? How is SEO better than PPC for this purpose?

[kkchoon]

Originally Posted by MSGeek

Really? How, for example, about my argument of using PPC to quickly test a niche before investing time and money into the site, content, SEO, and, potentially, even a product? How is SEO better than PPC for this purpose?

Lol, do you know how Jeff Johnson do his research?

We can build bunch of auto blogs before attacking a market, just an idea is enough to build these blogs!

Don't for a moment think that building these blogs take a lot of time! You can automate all these stuff with minimum spending! And the greatest part, each blog actually contribute the income from adsense or amazon sales!

After setup bunch of auto blogs, let it run by its' own, auto backlinks and let it grow until a point where some hit the Jackpot, just like PPC!

We enter the market when the traffic starts to jump high, adding more content and banner ads to redirect the traffic to our money site. No time and money wasted, and we get to build tons of nice sites that we can easily monetize from selling it!

Both PPC and organic works great, but organic search tends to have lower cost in long run, that's the fact!

[MustafaKamal]

I like your idea choon!

I find it very cost efficient and a foresight investment worth killing the time for.

At the same time, I have to agree on organic search as it is indeed a wise method to actually get traffic in the long run.

Kudos to SEO!

[Daniel Molano]

Originally Posted by MSGeek

Really? How, for example, about my argument of using PPC to quickly test a niche before investing time and money into the site, content, SEO, and, potentially, even a product? How is SEO better than PPC for this purpose?

I already agreed on the diversification aspect long ago. As for the debate, I'm speaking of which beats which in terms of the stand alone method.

[Mike Anthony]

Well you called it. Wish Macfreddie would have been able to stick around. As a newbie on this forum I had my pen and paper out on how he was going to dominate number one in 72 hours. Oh well back to fudging around without his "secret".

[Avidpoet]

Originally Posted by ipenema

I dont think there algorythm is as scary as they like us to believe its just to many pages out there to keep a tight hold of unless you got Bigfoot sized footprints for them to follow.

Must be an echo in here lol I said the same thing in post #5 thanks for posting it again I think

[sree94]

I will say this much... it is very hard to go back to doing SEO after PPC

The reason? Traffic and sales come SOOOO much faster with PPC

[marketseeker]

Originally Posted by Daniel Molano

Well, if I thought like that I would be losing most of my profit.

When you handle massive amounts of targeted traffic like I do (100,000 unique visitors per month or so), even the slightest change in conversion means hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

And I know for a fact SEO has a better conversion, I've split tested this about 100 times.

Simple math.

In one of my biggest split tests (10,000 uniques from both sources), my PPC traffic had about 2.3% conversion and my SEO had a 3.1% conversion.

That's not much of a difference when you handle low amounts of targeted traffic.

But using my average overall traffic (100,000 unique visitors per month):

100,000 x 2.3% x $30 average price point = $69,000 USD per month

100,000 x 3.1% x $30 average price point = $93,000 USD per month

That's a $24,000 USD per month loss for thinking like that.

And that's only in sales, add 100,000 clicks per month to your PPC loss. At $0.5 per click which is not rare, you just lost another $50,000 per month. Your PPC profit is down to $19,000 USD per month.

Whereas my SEO campaign costs me $2,000 per month at most.

So let's recap. Under this scenario.

PPC = $288,000 USD per year.

SEO = $1,092,000 USD per year.

And in 100% of my split tests, this has been proven to be true. SEO has a better conversion.

Are you telling me it doesn't matter?

Both together should be about 1.3 right?

This is only your testing and you may be doing it wrong. I've been doing seo and ppc since one cent clicks at 7 search and I'm here to tell you if you can't make money from ppc you don't know what you're doing. Both models have pluses and minuses. PPC is quick and great for market research and seo is good for taking advantage of that market research. Both have their place and both are very valuable. Some of my clients have made $100,000 per year using ppc spending $300 per month in adspend along with seo while others in their market are only making the average for the trade. $50k

[Buhry]

Must say I'm impressed and inspired by your success in ranking for business consulting, Daniel. According to Market Samurai you are currently number 2! Do you have any product aside from the 10 commandments of seo, the newbie product you are offering for free, and the consulting? Like some tactics for link building for achieving these high rankings? I would be willing to pay quite a bit to know that... But not 10 grand at the moment! XD

[focusinternetservices]

PPC is always secondary to a well designed and executed SEO campaign. The majority of my clients opt for initial PPC transitioning to straight organic once placement has been achieved in the top results.

[BethanyTbloosky]

If you can afford it, I say SEO and PPC always complement each other. For example, if you take up the entire 1st page real estate for your best keyword, you gain authority, respect, and your odds of visitors clicking your site go up with each piece of real estate owned by that site.

For example, if you're in the top 3 positions of the paid ads, you're the #1 organic position with your site's root, and the following postions, above the fold, are your merchant circle accounts, your yelp page, and your yellowpages listing (or any other orangic submission )- and all these contain your business name, people will trust that you're the leader and figure head for whatever they searched. The reason being; people of the world trust Google... and Google is doing whatever they can to keep that trust by improving their algorithm each day, week, month, and year; However, us SEO's know they're not *quite* there yet


BT

[valiantbearded]

Daniel Awesome. Should I tip my hat to you, when you find a page one rankings in such a short period of time, and so the word "money".

[zoltancorleone]

I agree with what I have said here. It's funny, sad way, I wasted thousands of dollars in spite of PPC to do thorough keyword research and monitoring and testing constraints. I have made much more with SEO. It seems that it is difficult to do SEO - it's not ... It's a waste of time only. I take my time and rather than do it right 'from a look at those disgusting signs Adwords LG.

Wow! What a wonderful arrangement. Yes - I suppose certainly a 'must have someone if I saw your site next to IBM and Entrepreneur magazine. I think it would be 'social proof' at its best.

[wordpresstrainingpackage]

Of course organic SEO is better than PPC. We all know that. But how many people can make good income from organic SEO? With PPC, you can generate more than 20,000 targeted traffic to your site in a day. How you do that with organic SEO? Of course that is not possible. Everything has benefits and limitations. You still need PPC if you want to make money online.

[achong]

Organic SEO is good for long run. we do not need pay anything. The problem is need word hard to get it.

[GrowTallerNiche]

I was going to post my opinion but it would seem stupid after all the experts have posted already.

PPC can go to places SEO can't like on sites. You can also do image PPC ads.
PPC can double up with SEO helping you to further dominate the search engine results.

With SEO you can afford to get "crappy" traffic that doesn't convert.

[frankconner]

SEO is an excellent way to generate more traffic without paying anything. SEO (Search Engine) is not instant gratification. If you are not the kind of person willing to be patient and wait for your SEO campaign, you can open a PPC account to generate more traffic from a different audience. It will cost a little money, but if you have the budget, it is worth the investment.

[rahulbatra]

Yes you are correct that organic SEO is better than PPC in terms of everything and its good to read all these discussions and be a part of it.

[junkdna]

Originally Posted by Daniel Molano

I was thinking of making a huge thread about the advantages/disadvantages of SEO Vs PPC.

But I figured a small list would do better, it's actually quite simple.

Here's why organic SEO is better than PPC:

1. The leads generated by SEO are 'hotter'.

A lot of people know that PPC is paid advertising.

Meanwhile, outside the Internet Marketing niche, most people don't know that SE rankings can be "manipulated".

So they genuinely perceive it as a Google recommendation if you're on the top spots.

2. SEO has extremely low costs.

You might want to outsource some stuff or hire an SEO service, but you can pretty much do everything yourself for free. It would be time consuming but worth it.

Whereas in PPC there's keywords rising to even $50 per click, that's insane.

3. Authority Value.

A few months ago I made a poll here discussing what would define an authority site.

The general consensus was that the top organic SEO rankings for the most competitive niche keywords would define one.

Conclusion

The only particular advantage of PPC is that it can be implemented fairly fast. You can have a campaign running within a few hours.

However, that is a disadvantage by itself, people rush into their PPC campaigns without doing the proper research previously and lose a lot of money.

Anyway, my best example of SEO power would be May 16, 2009.

Thanks to my "impossible" business consulting ranking (300,000 monthly searches and 40,000,000 competing sites), I made $125,000 USD from 3 sales in 1 day.

My guess is that when you're positioned next to IBM and Entrepreneur Magazine it really helps.

What would someone believe when they see your site there?

"Google places this guy next to IBM and Entrepreneur Magazine, he must be something".

The above quoted text is what a client told me he thought once he saw that precise ranking. I'm talking about an offline client, who had no idea about Internet Marketing until after he paid me $50k.

Talk about insane traffic and ultimate branding.

What are your thoughts?

Huge problem with SEO is that you can only focus on few keywords, while with PPC you can go for all of them.

Another problem with SEO is that you have to keep pumping, otherwise your position on Google will decay.

[junkdna]

Originally Posted by Daniel Molano

PPC

Everyone knows PPC is paid advertising, that people had to pay money to get up there, whereas with SEO they don't.

According to Google's own studies, 60% of general public do not know that links on the side column are sponsored. Because it is still legal obligation to distinguish between organic and paid, Google is using the smallest and the palest font, with just one word "Ads". Efectively, they are avoiding as hell to educate general public, that side column is not organic.

[Daniel Molano]

Originally Posted by junkdna

According to Google's own studies, 60% of general public do not know that links on the side column are sponsored. Because it is still legal obligation to distinguish between organic and paid, Google is using the smallest and the palest font, with just one word "Ads". Efectively, they are avoiding as hell to educate general public, that side column is not organic.

I'm sure Google would say that of course.

It's just a matter of getting #1 organic ranking for a particular keyword phrase, then get #1 PPC ranking and hold it for a while.

The statistics, which have no particular bias, will show you that PPC will never exceed 5% CTR (average is 3% actually) and that organic can exceed 50% CTR (average is 42%).

Now, I do agree that PPC is much more versatile as thousands of keywords may be chosen. However, that also means that you will receive less traffic from the best converting keywords than you would from SEO.

[marklucas8]

Yep, deplorably the only thing about SEO is that it takes time to carry out sometimes as well as you need to have a SEO friendly site.

[princeambrose12]

Daniel impressive. I tip my hat to you, after seeing the page of a ranking in as little as a keyword like "money."

[sree94]

Just not seeing this to be true in my own experience:

Position 8 in Adwords vs. Position 8 in Organic Listings

[Aki Fagno]

Excellent post you have there dude.I really enjoyed reading it. I have learned a lot. Great!

[sree94]

SEO beats PPC if you are in the number one position of Google. If not, good luck

I got my site to #2 in Google, right behind the merchant for the keyword I am targeting. And my traffic is nowhere near where it was when I did PPC. I also noticed on Compete.com that while the merchant site does get 40% of traffic, a PPC ad that is at the top of the page is getting the second most amount of traffic

Granted, getting ranked very high in the organic listings costs much less than PPC, but unless you are in the top spot, I would not expect a gold shower of traffic

[Ideaswise]

I read a couple of years ago that someone from Google actually admitted that for every one person who clicks on a ppc ad, about four click on a natural listing.

[TurnkeyBusinessBlogs]

PPC Advantages;

1. IF APPROVED (big if) the traffic is instant
2. Easier to get exposure on high traffic keywords

PPC DIS-Advantages;

1. Expensive
2. Exposure on specific search engines (if they approve your ad)
3. Can be taken from you ANY time they feel like it

Organic, natural traffic is by far the best;

1. All traffic is free
2. No-one can ever take away your traffic if you are white hat
3. Exposure in ALL search engines
4. Less time wasted on campaigns and more time on content

Our small company stopped using PPC last year, and we made less money for 6 months until the natural traffic started to make up for it. Now we are making more money than ever before with natural. Last month we made $7,500 and change from Adsense alone, and last year the same month we only made a profit of $6,200 in Adsense.

Stick with the naturals and be patient.

[App Developers]

I have to say thanks for the post. I totally agree!

[sree94]

Having now been ranked for the same keyword in both PPC and the organic listings, I can tell you that whoever says SEO wins is probably trying to sell an SEO course

When I was able to buy Adwords, I got six times more traffic than I do in organic listings

Case closed

[JoshTara]

Not that my 2 cents is worth a whole lot. But for as long as I can remember I've always avoided clicking the sponsored links, on search engines at least. But I have clicked on the facebook PPC adds once in a while.

[dagaul101]

To get to your position without paying is always the best thing. The major problem with PPC is the bounce rate, as they know it's paid, so they come on and if they don't like it they head off pretty quickly

[mikewright789]

Google only makes there experiencing on the PPC side so they believe that Google puts that fog out there frightening SEO Marketers into expenditure money on the PPC side.

[ziram]

Most of the people go to search engine result than the ads like what PPC is.

[raven2424]

seo is free if you do it your self and also its long term once your there of course! great tips on showing why seo is so awesome

[dark witness]

All I can say is this has been a great debate.

Dan, I take my hat off to you and the results you have got in the space of time you have been marketing.

I have been into this getting onto two years and only really got into seo for about a year now. If I had the money I would join your program, but still sharing info on the forum like this and also seeing some of the more experienced guys drop in with their own opinions and information is very helpful and inspiring.

great post.

[mattprince789]

Pay Per Click is considered a strong traffic generator, i.e. a tool that will drive traffic to the advertizers' sites. Research has shown that on the average search results page, over 80% of searchers will click on the organic search results, with the remainder clicking on PPC ads.

[derecksmith262]

Google only makes there living on the PPC side so they believe that Google puts that fog out there scaring SEO Marketers into spending money on the PPC side.