HFTB Marketing Blog

Walk through your local grocery store’s produce section and one thing is clear – organic sells. In the last decade or so, the term organic has come to stand for products that are free of hormones, additives or preservatives that have in the past, made our food look better, grow bigger, or last longer.

image by Secret Tenerife

In short, organic is natural.

So why the move away from seemingly beneficial, man-made science?

The answer is perception. There is a perception that organic is necessarily better for you because it lacks unnatural influences.

I caught a Hubspot webinar this week that touched on the pros of organic. Of course, we’re talking about search at this point, not apples and oranges.

The subject of the webinar was managing a move away from Google PPC (pay per click) campaigns in favor of an organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. Organic, in the case of SEO, refers to the results that are listed on the left hand side of the search results pages (SRP) as opposed to those PPC results on the right.

The basic gist of the webinar was that organic results are, simply put, better than PPC results. To be fair, I imagine Hubspot would claim the timeframe makes a difference here – organic results requiring in almost all cases a longer term to show results.

But I think the idea of one type of traffic as better than the other is an oversimplification. And here’s why.

There is a perception that organic results are free. Once again, as with food, perception colors the organic discussion.

Organic search is anything but free. In fact, I would argue that organic results are often more expensive, at least in the short term, than are PPC results.

Organic results require Google to recognize your site, and more accurately your site content, as extremely relevant to your desired search terms (or keywords). What has to happen for this to occur? A lot of things.

First, you’re going to need relevant, targeted and keyword-rich content. Then you’re going to need highly ranked sites to link to yours. Next, you need to make sure you are putting out new content, still as relevant as the existing content, very frequently. And don’t forget about your on-page optimization.

So is it hopeless? Should you quit your organic efforts before you start? Not at all. These are important pieces to your overall SEO strategy. But recognize that organic is not free. And while it uses the term organic, it doesn’t mean that it is necessarily better than PPC campaigns at driving prospective customers to your site.

Instead, let’s look at PPC and organic SEO on a continuum. Some business objectives favor organic results, some favor PPC. But almost all can benefit from the right mix of the two. In other words, no need to cancel your Google account.

But what do we know about the differences between the two tactics?

Well, we know that for your organic rankings to pay off, you’re going to need to make a commitment, over time, to a substantial amount of work. For most businesses, that means dedicating an internal resource to managing your web efforts. And depending on the size of your company and your online goals, this can be a full-time job.

Not sounding so inexpensive, dare I say “organic,” any more.

PPC campaigns on the other hand, are less time intensive, but have a measurable price tag attached. That price tag, while ranging in relative cost from inexpensive to expensive depending on your industry, is very manageable. You control, to a great degree, how much you spend. And, as a result, you control how much traffic Google sends to your site. The trade-off is the time and effort of an internal resource for an added expense.

So on one hand we have organic results taking a long-term, dedicated effort by an internal person or persons. On the other, we have a fast and eminently manageable expense that drives traffic to your site right now. The key to a successful strategy is leveraging both in varying degrees.

And as such, I would argue that both should play an ongoing role in most companies’ online marketing efforts.

While both organic and PPC can be effective, know what you’re in for if you choose to focus exclusively on the former. There’s no free lunch after all… not even if it’s organic.

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Marketing, New Marketing, SEO digital marketing, New Marketing, new media strategy, Online marketing, optimize websites, organic search, PPC

image by Joe Shlabotnik

Your price, whether you sell a product or service, is most likely based on the costs you pay to produce the product or deliver the service… plus your margin obviously. You have to make a margin, right?

But what goes into your margin? There may be more than you think. In fact, there is often a hidden component that instead of boosting your bottom line, may eventually cost you your entire sale.

Rohit Bhargava has an interesting post on his Influential Marketing blog about a related concept – making your price less expensive to your customers without reducing your monetary price. His point is that there are things we can do to make our services or products less expensive for customers (without reducing the actual monetary price they pay) through what I would term, business process improvements.

The idea makes a lot of sense. After all, we’ve all dealt with unresponsive sales people, poorly designed websites and less than helpful customer service departments. What do all these things have in common? They waste our time. They also make the product or service relatively more expensive.

It’s important to take a long look at the product or service you provide and ask yourself, “What can we do to make our customer interactions and relationships less expensive… for our customers?” I’m not talking about your price. Look more closely at the markup that isn’t seen in what you charge. The markup that includes waiting time, unanswered calls and delayed shipments, to name a few.

The worst part of this unseen markup is that no one gets the benefit. It simply evaporates without lending value to your customer or dollars to your bottom line.

But don’t be fooled. Customers will feel the markup. They may not think of it in terms of an added margin on your services. But they will notice unneeded conference calls, late deliverables and unfulfilled promises. The result, a wandering eye for other service providers that might not be quite as inefficient in managing their time as are you.

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Marketing customer relationships, Marketing, marketing communications, optimize websites, traditional marketing

For some reason there is a pervasive belief that SEO is a process that can be applied to any website.  I have clients ask us to optimize websites that were written years ago without a thought about how they would be found, or more accurately, searched for on the Internet.

I guess this idea has been talked up by a lot of firms that are proponents of the coding side of the argument.  In other words, most optimization work takes place behind the curtain – a process that few would understand and is too high-level to be explained anyway.

This idea makes sense, in a self-perpetuating kind of way.  After all, if it is so difficult to figure out the inner workings of the Google algorithm, barriers to entry in the SEO space are high.  Effectively keeping those without genius IQs and degrees in Computer Engineering out of the business.

Of course, there are those (myself among them) that believe the barriers to SEO aren’t daunting at all.  In fact, they aren’t really even there, from a high-level coding and computer science perspective.

In my experience, the most effective optimizers are those with a compelling story to tell.  Simple as that.

Once again, we default back to the time-tested rule: content is king.

So if you are looking for search rankings and a robust presence on the Web, focus on what your customers want, need, and are likely to search for.  Then tell them your product story and how it satisfies their want, fulfills their need, and is the product they are searching for.

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SEO coding, content, optimize websites, search engine optimization, SEO