SEO vs. PPC

An associate of mine contacted me a few weeks ago asking me to handle a PPC campaign for her and I refused.  I don't do PPC!  PPC is a temporary (and expensive) fix to having your site found in the search engines - and more often than not, your ROI is rarely recouped. 

I told her if her client wants to throw away her money like that, just send ME a check for doing absolutely nothing instead of sending it to the PPC companies who are already making tons of cash off of people/companies.  While a PPC company returns virtually nothing in the form of real leads I will at the least send a thank you card!

A lot of readers might disagree with this statement, and that's fine, different strategies work with different people, but my personal experience in managing PPC campaigns for agents is that zero (yes NONE) of those clients were (a) happy with their ROI (b) happy with me after spending hundreds sometimes thousands of dollars on PPC campaigns that netted them a big fat goose egg.

So - I don't offer PPC services any longer, haven't in a few years.  It's a waste of money.  I always recommend that an agent spend that money on search engine optimization services so that their sites are naturally ranked higher in the search engines.

My theory is this, let's say you have a budget of $500 a month to spend on marketing and you choose to spend it on a PPC campaign...I can tell you in advance that you'd be lucky to score one client/sale off of that campaign...so let's say 8 months down the road, after spending $4,000 on fruitless marketing efforts you're financially strapped and can no longer afford the $500 month budget for marketing.  Where are you now?  You're without a marketing budget and just as low in the search engine rankings as you were when you started.

So what have you accomplished?  Absolutely nothing! 

Find an SEO expert and work on your rankings!!  Quit throwing your money away because most home buyers who Google online do NOT click on the paid advertisements...and here's a little secret - the ones who ARE clicking on your paid advertisements are probably your competitors!