SEO - to start with Paid Search or Natural Search?
Should a business start with Paid Search (Pay-per-Click, PPC) or Natural Search (Search Engine Optimization)? This is a great question and one to heavily consider.
PPC Campaigns can get your website showing on the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo …) nearly immediately. The setup of a thorough paid campaign can run 10-25% of your project monthly budget, typically with a $500 monthly minimum fee - plus the cost of the clicks. So a $5,000 monthly budget could cost $1,000 (setup at 20%) and then a monthly maintenance fee of, say 10% or $500. The good news is the control, flexibility and ability to measure results. Your SEO Company should be able to measure the number of goal conversions, which will give you solid metrics to measure your ROI.
Natural Search is the optimization of your website and the promotion of that website to the major search engines. Don’t be fooled by SEO Companies that ’submit your site to thousands of search engines’ - there are only a handful of major search engines and directories that matter at all. The old saying ‘you get what you pay for’ is very relevant with SEO Work, however you have to go deeper because a large price tag doesn’t always mean you are getting the best service either. Natural Search takes time to be successful and requires someone that really has experience in the SEO field.
The answer that we recommend is: do both.
Paid Search gets you going and provides great information to the SEO manager, which will help considerably with the Natural Search campaign. It really comes down to budget and goals.