I was looking through articles claiming that being on page one organically was better than paid per click along with their reasons and concluded one thing.
Not one of these SEO guys know anything about sales. lol. Seriously, ask them how many direct sales jobs they have worked where they had to get their own leads and close them in order to bring home a paycheck. I suspect the only selling they are doing is the selling of their snake oil to their disciples 🙂
Here is what I think, when people are ready to buy, they want something that matches what they type (usually it’s a money keyword that the SEO guys have missed) and they want a heading that sounds like it will provide them the product or service they want to buy and they want to land on a page that will make it easy for them to obtain the product or service.
All these long tail keywords they tell you to rank for that have low comp have low comp for a reason. Buyers are not typing those. Google would have suggested those keywords to PPC guys to try long before the SEO guys catch wind of them.
I was reading https://blog.kissmetrics.com/lessons-learned-from-adwords-audits/ and according the authors audits he found that 91% of the keywords people were bidding on were drains, not converting. What does that say about all the keywords a site that relies on SEO alone is ranking on? Most likely duds.
Successful adwords advertisers know that the first month may not be profitable on a new campaign because they need to sample and test the keywords to find the ones that actually convert. Once that is known the duds are removed from the adword group.
In fact, one way to figure out which keywords are good to go after in your SEO campaigns is to test those keywords in adwords first.
A friend Tony Romo pointed out “Also determining which click attribution strategy works best based on the data you want to collect, and setting up the proper goals in Google Analytics. A/B testing Ad Copy, Landing Page Copy, Match Types, Mobile Device Bid Adjustments, all of it goes into producing a winning campaign that can scale.”
You simply cannot test and adjust all of these things using SEO only.
As far as the argument “With PPC you lose the traffic when you stop paying for clicks”. No, you lose the sales and your competitor who continues to their campaign gets the sales instead.
For more in depth study of this check out this case study
