SEO vs. PPC - The Wrong Question

As referenced in articles such as SearchEngineWatch.com's Selling SEO Projects Against PPC Campaigns, marketers and marketing consultants at times must decide between PPC and SEO budgets. But this "either-or" approach misses the mark.

SEO and PPC should be two integral parts of the same campaigns, each individually less effective without the other. SEO is more effective at attracting the larger masses of searches, and typically has more inherent credibility by the searchers, but PPC is more effective at nimbly targeting changing long tails of searches. Moreover, PPC is ideally suited as a short-term testing ground to steer longer term SEO efforts.

Smart marketers use both of these tools, along with others (such as social media tactics) to maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns. At Domus, Inc., a full service integrated marketing communications agency, we work with our clients researching, developing, executing, analyzing, and continually refining integrated marketing campaigns. Visit us at our web site for more about us.

  1. Comment by Over 50 Health & Beauty on 7/2/09, 6:51 PM

    I agree with you. Most of my clients are involved in PPC and SEO. Integrating the two strategies is not only effective, but it provides a great deal of learning about search behavior for individual services, products and business categories. Like all Internet marketing, there is no cookie cutter solution...each business is different and has different needs.

  2. Comment by Web Marketing on 7/20/09, 9:58 PM

    I agree completely with this statement. I always suggest to clients that they actually start the marketing campaign with SEO while we work on the organic ranking growth. Then once we have attained page 1 presence naturally, we can remove those keywords from the PPC account.