PPC or SEO ???

Hi JawadAshraf,

Thanks for perfectly illustrating my point.

If you truly put a lot of time and effort into learning PPC you would learn the real value of testing. You get similar value in testing within your SEO campaigns.

I guess you could say there are 2 kinds of learning, 1. learning about a subject, 2. Learning from experience. The first kind brings awareness, the second kind brings knowledge. It makes sense that you might find it difficult to see the value in something that you have never experienced.

One of the things you will likely discover from lots of experience in testing PPC campaigns is that some keywords that you thought would be the most valuable for SEO, actually do not convert as well as you had imagined they would. And, that some long tail keywords might convert so high that you are way better off targeting those keywords first. Without testing, you would never know this. So, you might actually be wasting lots of time and money. From your perspective of having no comparable data you are oblivious to just how much of your time and money you have wasted. I guess this is what is meant by that saying "ignorance is bliss".

Please allow me to illustrate my point with a hypothetical example:

Let's say you have a dog training course you sell and you are deciding which keyword to target from the following choices:

• dog training - 8100 monthly searches
• dog training classes - 4400
• puppy training classes - 3600

"Dog training" looks like a good short head keyword, relevant to your niche, lots of search volume, right? Of those 3 it looks like the best, and "puppy training classes" looks to be the worst, right? Even if you could rank "Puppy training classes" at half the time and cost, it still doesn't look at first glance to be as good as "dog training", right?

While that would be true if they each had the exact same CTR and the exact same conversion rate. But guess what? They do not have the same CTR, nor the same conversion rates. You are not safe using industry, or niche averages, each keyword has it's own distinct key metrics. Where are you going to get this data from without testing?

After running a short series of tests you might discover the following:

• dog training - CTR 1.79 % | Conversion rate 2.2%
• dog training classes - CTR 4.7% | Conversion rate 3.9%
• puppy training classes - CTR 12.6% Conversion rate 6.9%

Now let's say your value per conversion is $30 so you can now calculate a value per click and value per month for each keyword:

• dog training - Value per click $0.66 | Value per month $95.69
• dog training classes - Value per click $1.17 | Value per Month $241.96
• puppy training classes - Value per click $2.07 | Value per Month $938.95

Now, with this data we see these keywords in a completely different light. We can now see the true value of each keyword. We might also discover the keyword that looked like the most valuable, without this new data, is actually the worst choice for optimizing, both in terms of value per click, as well as cost per click.

Using PPC to test for SEO can be just as beneficial for your SEO campaigns as it is for your PPC campaigns. You can test SEO campaigns without PPC, it is just much more difficult and generally takes much longer to get valid actionable data. As you can see with the above example, testing does indeed payoff for SEO.

This is actually an old argument. Please allow me to defer to one of the worlds most renowned marketers, David Ogilvy, that has written volumes of books about it. He has plenty to say about the differences in approach for direct response advertisers verses the "creative" radio, TV, newspaper and magazine camps.

In the world of Internet marketing, PPC is the modern day equivalent of the direct mail response of the past. The same argument was made by Ogilvy for the exact same reason. Just as he could instantly recognize radio and TV ads that were created by experienced direct response marketers, one can identify SEO campaigns managed by experienced PPC marketers. They know their numbers and they use scientific approach with a lot of data analysis. They know their costs and you never hear them refer to SEO as "free".

In all the years I have been a reader here at WF I think I could count the discussions about CPA, value per click, and cost per click for SEO on one hand, perhaps on one finger. It is painfully obvious that most SEO marketers, that do SEO exclusively, have absolutely no interest in knowing that kind of data, most certainly do not discuss it often, or ever, in public forums like here at WF.

SEO marketers that have been trained in PPC bring to that channel of marketing a set of skills and practices that seems relatively rare within the SEO workers' community. That was, and remains my point. Ogilvy has written about it extensively in his books. Here is a short video where he touches on the same concept:


Just as Ogilvy argues for the integration of Direct Response departments with general advertising, I likewise argue for the combining of PPC with SEO for a fully integrated SEM marketing strategy, for roughly the same reasons.

Please don't take me wrong on this, I am not implying that no SEO marketer ever learns and uses these skills, only that on the rare occasions you see it, it almost invariable turns out to be a person that has been trained and experienced in PPC marketing. There is something to be said for that.

The debate between SEO or PPC is always going to be somewhat of a heated conversation but the thing to keep in mind is that regardless, they both drive traffic. With out traffic you can't optimize for conversions. In all honesty the two methods work hand in hand if approached properly because SEO should be your foundation. PPC cost money and in return you get almost immediate results with highly targeted traffic, as opposed to SEO being organic and in most cases slower results but also highly targeted traffic. The main thing to focus on is testing to see what source of traffic works best for you, not what works for someone else. Any experienced marketer will tell you that in order to stay ahead, you need to be innovative and think outside the box. Remember, what works for someone else doesn't always work for you!

Nope.... I didn't say there was anything dubious at all. Look whose trying to twist?? I merely pointed out one of MANY links/studies that show differences of conversions between organic and PPC which illustrates in some instances why you cannot use PPC conversions to project organic. Simple Don. Now you are showing you are not even up on PPC.

Wrong again Don. They are not the exact same audience. Sheesh you are very bad at this. Theres a whole segment of people that will NEVER click an ad link. The act of clicking on an ad as opposed to organic filters those people out when you do PPC. This is elementary stuff and its one of the reasons why organic in some instances is projected to close better and in some cases worse. Seh la vie

I said the ratio for higher commercial intent was closer days ago Don. that goes whether for per impressions or for conversions on page . Not the issue . The issue is that your idea of using a PPC campaign conversion rate (be it higher or lower) to project organic in that and other cases would be entirely flawed. sometimes it does work out some times not so much. Incidentally I cited two to show there are differences from one study to another. You just skipped over the other one

http://searchenginewatch.com/article...ins-94-of-Time

Either way the point is crystal clear. Using PPC, (much less claiming PPC should be used For SEO calculations of cost to value) as some reliable way of projecting organic ROI is nonsense.

They center around commercial intent but not high commercial intent. It seems you don't understand what that means. A guy looking to research life insurance to make a purchase has commercial intent. while a guy gone past that stage and looking who to buy it from has high commercial intent

Do you have any other tactic? an honest one perhaps? You use this one very often and it doesn't and will never work with me. You were the one that claimed that SEos on this forum do not use cost value calculations simply because they do not discuss it much. I presented why they don't speak about it much because its done on the backend and the cost cannot be ascertained before hand and said it was a guess going in and you and Lucid claimed that it need not be.

Now you are forced to admit that yes there are a number of variables and you can only estimate (same as a guess) and cannot explain how cost is going to be determined heading into a campaign so you go to fudging that you never said what you said and I am twisting. Totally dishonest ploy on your part.

So again Don please tell the class how you are going to determine cost value of SEO based on PPC when you do not know the cost of positioning the page
organically or if you can't at least have the integrity to withdraw your accusation that SEOs here do not use cost value calculations just because, it being different in organic,they do not discuss it as much going into a campaign.

Utter drivelling nonsense. Go do some research. No one needs to take your or my self attested anecdotal evidence. The differences with how you can and cannot calculate value to cost in organic SEO as opposed to PPC are well known , have been tested multiple times and are available on the net for anyone who wished to look. Your game is to constantly critique SEOs here even going into the SEO section to do so. Your criticisms have been debunked again so all you have are self proclamations

Wow mike, you just keep arguing abouts points on which we do not disagree, while ignoring the points that we are actually asserting.

Now I will disagree on that assertion.

The average conversion rates across all organic keywords is indeed different from the average for PPC, when looking at the 2 groups in aggregate. That is due to the fact that most clicks on organic searches are informational and not high commercial intent keywords. But we are not talking about averages of aggregated totals, we are talking about specific keywords that are targeted presumably for high commercial intent.

We are referring to the exact same audience who searched for the exact same term, and clicked through from the exact same Search result page, and landed on the exact same landing page. There is rarely any meaningful statistical difference in conversion rates between organic and sponsored listings in that data.

Again no one made that assertion, so no need to look it up and it is just an irrelevant assertion (classic Mike non sequitur).

You do realize that it is so obvious when you are just making things up as you go as it often starts with "Every SEO knows" or similar. This is a technique known as "Argumentum ad populum" and appears to be one of your favorite goto fallicy arguments.

I challenge you to provide a single example of the search volume being wildly off. I'm not asserting it has never ever happened, just that it is extremely rare to ever see inaccurate search volume data from the AdWords keyword tools.
Again I didn't make that assertion, you did. And then you pretend to argue with me against it.You are only arguing with your own assertions. Let me know how that works out?

There you go again... arguing against your own assertions. I did not make that assertion, you did. Go ahead and argue with yourself some more, I'll just stand by as you make your imaginary argument. (classic Mike non sequitur)

Again, there you go arguing against your own assertion while pretending it was made by someone else.

My point has always been about data driven decision making, using data to inform our marketing decisions. You insist on trying to distort other people's words to a different meaning by taking them out of context and attributing them to things that were not implied.

Again twisting and distorting. You implying things that were not said. Argue with yourself, I am not going to participate in your delusions.

Regarding website promotional activities, like link building, I am not pulling this concept out of thin air, the precise definition of what is considered SEO has been debated in forums like WebmasterWorld for a long time. I personally favor the more precise definition that SEO is something we do to content to allow search engines to properly understand the relevant keywords for the page.

Please allow me to quote a 3rd party source:

"Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising.[1] SEM may use search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages, or use pay per click (PPC) listings."

source: Search engine marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I happen to agree with that description.

Other activities like "link building" is technically website promotional activities. I don't deny that many SEO folks do link building with the intent of manipulating search results. But it doesn't change the fact that the activity is promotional in nature.

Link building activity predates the earliest SEO efforts and originally was exclusively website promotional activity. And even today there are many links built purely for website promotional benefits, without regard to search engines. The fact that we can perform SEO on content used in links does not change the nature of the activity from that of promotional. So it is my opinion that link building and other similar activity is promotional in nature whether or not the content is also optimized for SEO. That is my opinion and I am not alone in this opinion,

Many link builders and web spammers prefer to call their activities SEO, I get why the do. SEO is generally a more respectable term for marketing purposes. Technically speaking, from my perspective, it would be accurate to call link building, or "link outreach", SEM. It doesn't always include SEO and it seems more promotional in nature. While I do understand that it is very popular to call it SEO, I just quibble a bit with the technical accuracy of that label. When it comes to SEO, I usually do not follow the crowd mentality, I prefer accurate labels and don't go in for the deceptive marketing terms just because they are "popular".

You can call me all the names you want because I don't conform to your notion of what is popular and common. As long as I continue to get tens of thousands of transactions from search engine traffic each month I can live with the name calling. Just please stop trying to distort what I wrote. Let my words speak for themselves and use your words to speak for you.

I said "may or may not get you more visitors".... how is that a myth?

I'm sure there are many people out there who were pretty sure they "knew what they were doing," until one Google algorithm proved otherwise.