PPC (pay per click) or SEO (search engine optimization) – A Choice?
Here’s your dilemma: You have a new website, or have decided to upgrade your old one so that it will bring you some of that business that your competitors have been raking in.
You read a few articles, talk to a few colleagues, and horror of horrors even listen to some of the telemarketers trying to separate you from your cash. Pretty soon your vocabulary is laced with “PPC” for Pay Per Click and “SEO” for Search Engine Optimization and “Meta Tags” and “Incoming Links” and “Search Engine Robots” and “Search Phrases” and,….well you get the drift.
After mounting the learning curve you get to the point where you know that there is no “Free” way to get traffic and prospects to your website. So, if you’re one of the few real estate agents without tons of cash, you’re going to have to make decisions on where to put your advertising dollars to get the best “bang for the buck”.If you don’t have a limit on your funds, then you shouldn’t be reading this or fooling around with your website. You should be playing golf or visiting a spa in Hawaii, but if you’re not golfing or spa-ing in Hawaii read on because making the wrong choice won’t just cost you your advertising budget, but will lose you all of the business a right choice would have made you.
First quick definitions of the two types of program and their general consequences.
PPC means bidding against your competitors for ad placement on the search engines.
SEO is attempting to make your website link appear in the “natural” (unpaid) positions on the search engines.
Well SEO sounds great because who doesn’t want advertising where you don’t have to pay for it? The only problem is that — especially for real estate — there are hundreds or thousands of sites that want the same thing. When you find out the things you have to do and the money you must spend and the time it takes to (maybe) achieve that golden dream of being on the first page of a Google search for your best search phrases you begin to understand that there really are no free search engines.
The payoff with SEO is that if you manage to get on top and if you make the effort to stay there and if you have the time to wait until your SEO kicks in (could be six months, could be over a year, could be never) then you do have a terrrific source of prospective prospects.
PPC on the other hand is “instant gratification”. Within hours of setting up a PPC account you can have targeted traffic coming to your website regardless of the site’s incoming links, meta tags, word density, age on the Internet, etc, etc.
For the short term there’s absolutely no doubt that the best choice is PPC if it’s set up properly. It’s the program that can grow your business while you are also working on SEO so you’ll have better unfree traffic in the future.
So in short it’s SEO for the long term and PPC for the short term (and maybe the long term too).