The eMarketing Blog

Are SEO and PPC worth the time and money? February 14, 2008

I recently read a blog post questioning the value of search engine marketing – are SEO and PPC worth the time and money, the business owner wanted to know? SEO firms charge SMB’s a small fortune to optimize their website, and not all start up businesses can afford these charges. 

 While I agreed that outsourcing your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can be rather expensive, it must be, that of all the forms of eMarketing – banner and email to external lists included, it is my experience that SEO is the most profitable.

In our business we drive a large percentage of our sales via our website – it is not only our brochure, but our sales vehicle.  We are fortunate to have highly sophisticated tracking systems in place to measure not only online revenue, but the number of clicks and registrations of all of our online marketing activities. Consistently, SEO ranks amongst our highest “earners” in terms of bringing in online revenue, as well a clicks and registrations. 

 
Because we serve the international market and are a South African company that has a global reach, one of our core goals are maintaining and extending our international web presence. While email and banner campaigns are useful for driving quarterly revenue via targeted promotions, SEO is the staple in our marketing diet and would be the segment of our budget we held onto, if we were hypothetically forced to choose. 
Businesses that have a few marketing pennies to spend on online advertising, should not waste them on banner advertising or email marketing (by purchasing external lists), as these are costly and hardly show the returns that SEO or even PPC could provide.

Rather invest as much as you can on these getting your organic and paid search rankings as high as possible and you are very likely to reap long term rewards. 

Here is a great B2B Case study from Marketing Sherpa demonstrating how a white paper press release that was SE optimised helped promote an organizations niche product in a very limited market. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30329&ff=true 

Of course, different strategies and approaches will always vary according to industry and product, so this is not to say the SEO and PPC are the only way to go. But for a largely online business, in my experience, they certainly are worth the investment – remember, optimizing your site for SEO is something that you can do yourself and need not cost you a fortune.