Why do companies buy ads when Search is free — Damon Burton // SEOnational

Quotes

• “I’m not the guy that says that there is one solution for everything so I’m not a PPC hater. It serves a purpose and the advantages and payout are quicker than SEO, you can get data quicker so that is fine. But if you have the patience to put in SEO, it has a bigger return on investment, it lasts longer and more stable.” -Damon“I think about the paid ad and there’s so many levers and moving things you have to turn off and on and monitor. So I think paid ads are often more complex especially right now with the whole virus thing going on. People are having to stretch their dollar further or put that dollar to a relationship that they trust more.” -Damon “When you have to decide in the situation of cash flow with the virus situation we have, do we tighten our budget and inherently decrease our exposure or are we doubling down and increase our budgets to try and retain sales. On the opposite side of the coin, all my clients are just fine on SEO because we don’t have to increase ad spend. We are not fighting and setting things differently that we haven’t conquered in the last years to get them to the top.” -Damon“In my mind, if you’re a brand that doesn’t have the resources, talent, horsepower or time to invest in SEO and you need business results now, SEO is your game. You put a dollar in and you hopefully get two dollars out, you can do that until you hit the point of diminishing returns and great. Now you’ve got a marketing channel as opposed to SEO where you can take months to years to build that reputation and domain.” -Ben “A lot of the times when you do paid ads, you are the shiny object. You have more impulsivity that you are trying to attract from a buyer but when you show up for SEO results, you have somebody that is searching for a very specific solution to a problem or answer to your question.” -Damon “What’s interesting is that paid ads can position from 0 to 4. Now even though those technically show up higher to an organic result, the clickthrough rate is astronomically higher on the organic results because people get banner blindness and know those are ads and skip over them.” -Damon“Depending on the industry, it’s anywhere from 10 to 40 times higher clickthrough rates. I was reading a study the other day and they say that an average clickthrough rate on a paid ad was well below 10% or was in the single digits but if you look at the top three results of organic positions combined, they get 55% of the search and 30% of the clicks and 30% of those clicks is just position number one.” -Damon “SEO is definitely not to save a sinking ship because as you said, it takes time. You have to have cash flow and you have to have patience and willingness to run your SEO for six months to a year or 18 months depending on how competitive your industry is, however long that takes.” -Damon“One thing to think about is, what platform you want to support because if you are always doing paid ads, you are not building a platform that you own indefinitely.” -Damon“The average ROI for Google is roughly 2X so if you are spending 60 grand a year, you are looking at 120 dollars of return and a 60K dollar profit.” -Ben “This answers why good SEO isn’t cheap because of the logistics behind what you need to put into an SEO effort. It just doesn’t make sense for anybody to charge you less than several thousand a month because there is a ton of stuff you got to put into it.” -Damon “What we want to look up is, ‘Is there search volume behind these potential targets and if there is search volume, how competitive is that market. That will help you have more realistic expectations.” -Damon “Good SEO takes time and that time has a price tag associated with it.” -Damon“There is not a fixed answer because it depends on your profit margins, it depends on your market cap. There are certain audiences for certain spaces but 60 to 80 percent is usually the average quantity of sales that organic makes up for clients.” -Damon“There’s a higher potential return and the beauty of organic growth in general is it’s organic and you don’t have to pay for it once you have established the content and your reputation with Google, you don’t have to pay for it every day. Once you have spent 60K dollars, you have essentially built a new foundation which will continue to drive organic growth.” -Ben