Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome.

Speaker 1: 1:23

Back to SEO is not that hard. It's me, ed Dawson, your host, as usual, and today's topic is SEO versus PPC. Now, obviously, we're an SEO podcast here, but PPC is a real, it's a crossover skill, really it's a crossover thing. So, and this, it's a crossover skill, really it's a crossover thing, and this topic was requested by at least two listeners, gareth being one of them. So hi, gareth, if you're listening. So, yes, seo versus PPC. Well, I'll just start by saying, although I've dabbled in PPC in the past and have done some PPC for quite considerable periods of time, I've never considered myself a PPC expert and the last time I used it in any kind of significant way, I used a PPC agency to set up the campaign for me not manage it, but to set it up for me. So let's go back to well. I mean, let's just start at the basics, right? Okay, seo, if you've listened to the podcast long enough, but I'll just recap it.

Speaker 1: 2:21

Anyway, seo is natural search engine optimization. That's where you get traffic for free. You don't pay Google or any other search engine for the traffic you receive. You are optimizing your website to rank well in the search engines, in the organic listings, where you don't pay, and so therefore you get the traffic for free. It takes longer to optimize for it. It's a longer-term game. You don't get instant results with SEO in the vast majority of cases, but when you do start to get results, you don't pay for every single visitor that comes. So obviously you do pay in terms of the time and effort and resources you put into building the website and building the content. You don't actually then pay for the traffic that comes through organic search. That's SEO.

Speaker 1: 3:08

Now, ppc, on the other hand, is completely different in terms of. It starts with pay per click, ppc, pay per click, but really we're talking probably any kind of paid ads here. Different in terms of it's not a pay-per-click PPC, pay-per-click and, but really we're talking probably any kind of paid ads here. So it could be from, could be advertising from another source, but I'm really only gonna, when I'm talking about here, I'm talking about, say, google, what they call it. Google Ads now used to be Google AdWords back in the day, and there you pay to have an advert at the top of Google for the keywords you want. Well, it used to be just for the keywords you want. I know it's a little different nowadays, but essentially you're paying to be on that first page of search results and you pay for every click. So if a website user, a Google user, clicks your ad, then you pay a cost for that click. So every click, every visit, costs you money.

Speaker 1: 4:07

So the advantage being, obviously, you can very quickly get traffic because you're paying for it. Traffic because, yeah, you're paying for it. So you don't have that ramp up period of you know, of having to slowly build up your rankings and to get the free traffic. You're bosh, you're straight in, you're going to get, you're going to get traffic straight away, caveat being, obviously you've got to pay for it. So you've got to make that traffic work for you, because if it's not working for you, if you're not converting it into a, into a sale or into whatever, your conversion metric is whether it's a email subscriber or whatever. It's whatever actually, when the people think if they're not doing it, then you quite swiftly lose money. Obviously, but the key thing is advantage wise is to shortcut that waiting period. You're still going to build a site, but You've still got to build a site. But you don't necessarily have to build a site that's got to rank well in organic. You can maybe do things and alter your content in a way that it can be much more aggressive commercially than can an SEO-optimized site.

Speaker 1: 5:14

That being said, there is a thing in Google Ad, in pp, in that ppc, where a site has to be relevant. So they won't, you know, they won't even let you buy traffic that it doesn't think your um, your website quality is high enough or is on topic enough and to be able to get it. So you can't completely do whatever you want. But again, by the same token, why would you buy traffic, no-transcript, and then send it to a page that was all about home furnishings? You'd be nuts because nothing's going to convert. So the fact they enforced that kind of sort of parameter isn't necessarily a bad thing for you.

Speaker 1: 5:50

But let's go back to our first, first time we ever used ppc, and that was back in the early days of broadband at code uk, and I think if you listen to the podcast story where I talk about that complete story of broadband at code uk, I mentioned that in the early days we did a lot of ppc because back in 2004, 2005, there was very little competition. So you could, we could buy clicks really really cheaply, and we could. Then, you know, we could convert them, we could send them off to the merchants who we were an affiliate for, and you know, I think for every pound we put in, we could get two pound back, literally like shooting fish in a barrel. It was really really profitable really quickly. Problem was, though, that very quickly, lots of people realized that there was a lot of money to be made by doing this, and the competition ramped up.

Speaker 1: 6:41

Now, obviously, the way that PPC works is you have to bid how much you want to pay for each click. So if you're making for every pound you put in or every dollar you put in, you're getting two dollars back as soon as other people realize. If you're making for every pound you put in or every dollar you put in, you're getting two dollars back as soon as other people realize, that you're literally got a machine that's printing money for you there. They'll come and say, well, we'll pay one dollar ten to get two dollars back. So then you have to go one dollar twenty to get two dollars back and eventually what happens is, if it gets broken, any kind of competition will soon bid itself up to the point where instead of doubling your money, you're just talking very small percentages. So if you're going to bid $1.90 to make $2 back, you've only got a 10 cent margin there, 5% margin. That's when it becomes incredibly competitive and only the site that can convert the best and has the deepest pockets can actually um you know, compete and start to make money.

Speaker 1: 7:36

And at broadbandcouk we didn't have the best site back then. We we were soon couldn't afford to buy traffic and convert it at a level. That way we made a profit. And that was actually a turning point for broadbandcouk, because we had a business partner then who was very into the sort of paid media side and PPC and wasn't interested in SEO at all. And as soon as it started losing money on PPC they lost interest and that's when we bought them out. Me and my wife bought that partner out and we changed our strategy to be no PPC and all SEO. Because that worked, because we could see over this period we had the SEO traffic building up. We could see that if we turn the PPC off, we tracked the sales which were paid sales and which were organic sales and we could see that. So if we just turn the PPC off, we'd be incredibly profitable on a smaller number of sales. But we were. We wouldn't be wasting loads of money on PPC. That wasn't making us a profit.

Speaker 1: 8:31

So, yeah, that was early days PPC for me and that's how our journey went. And then I didn't do any PPC again in any serious way for probably at least 10 years, I think. So the next time I got involved with PPC was with an e-commerce business that I made an investment into in at 2012 time, and then I helped them with their SEO and then with their PPC. Now, this was model railway stuff, funnily enough, and you know we did. It's a whole different story. I'm not going to go into the whole story of that business. It failed, unfortunately, after a few years for reasons outside of SEO and PPC, but we did set up PPC for products on that and that was across Google and we also did it across Amazon as well, but I'm mainly concentrating on the Google side here.

Speaker 1: 9:28

So, yeah, that worked really well in terms of um. You know, we it was different from when I've done it as an affiliate before, because obviously we were the merchants, so we could, we could control conversion a bit more. Uh, we could also control, for, you know, the products that we um bid on and the pricing and the margin we got within it. So so we did that now. Whether so we did that Now, whether you'd still be able to have as much control over e-commerce PPC now as back then, I don't know, because obviously Google Ads has got a lot more mystic, I suppose is the word to put it in terms of how you can decide what keywords you want to appear for. Back in the day day it was very much you could specify this keyword, this, this bidding, this bidding rate, and you know it was feels like you had much more granular control back then. Now there's so much stuff that they've put into how the ppc bidding works and how it decides what keywords to um put your ads up for and what variations. I from the last time I looked at it, which I've met it was a while ago. I don't think you have the control that you used to have, so whether that would work nowadays I don't know.

Speaker 1: 10:40

Fast forward a bit to um. Yeah, we did some more ppc on the affiliate side about from from about 2017 to 2022, I think on another this wasn't on broadband, this was on another website that was more in the telecom side um, consumer telecom side and we just identified um a. Well, the basic fact was we had traffic that had an average earning per click. Every click we sent to the merchants, our average earning per click was 20p, which is about 25, 30 cents, and I discovered that across a range of keywords, you could buy traffic for about 10p or about 12, 13 cents. It was a double your money thing again. And um, yeah, so I, with the help of an agency, ppc agency I got them to a contact um recommended someone who's good with ppc and I got them to set up the campaign for me that targeted this keyword and a sort of group of variations on this keyword that no one appeared to be bidding on.

Speaker 1: 11:58

Um.

Speaker 1: 11:59

And, yeah, it worked really, really well. It wasn't massive, massive volume. Um, I think it was probably making us about two or three thousand pounds a month or three, four thousand dollars a month, um, profit, um, but it did it consistently for, yeah, about five years. That again went away because the conversion rate from the merchants slowly dropped over time, because the market matured a bit, so that again came to a point where it started to lose money. We did also see a little bit of occasional competition from the merchants themselves on this. I think someone else had spotted that this was an underserved market, an underserved area of the market when it came to ppc. So I think I mean the summary is here that the trouble I've always found with ppc is that eventually all the profit gets eroded away. It either gets eroded away because the market changes, like it did with the more recent one, I did with the telecoms, so that although we could still buy the keyword, still buy the clicks cheaply, we couldn't monetize. The other monetization level dropped over time so it didn't monetize as well over time, so that eroded it away.

Speaker 1: 13:15

Or, as in the case with broadband, back into in the. You know, in the early 2000s was that basically competition for the keywords? Just grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and it gets to the point where only the sites with the best resources and the best conversion rate or the deepest pockets, can afford that traffic. And if you're doing it as an affiliate as we were back then obviously an affiliate you get a one-time fee. So you know we might make 50 quid, 50 pounds, for every broadband sale, for example. But the merchants themselves started bidding on the keywords because they've got a much greater lifetime value because you know, if they're bidding and getting a customer for you know, three, four years, then they've got much more margin to play with to be able to compete on that keyword. So again, they bid you out of the market. So that is the issue with PPC, that it becomes about who's got the deepest pockets, who's got the greatest lifetime value and who's got the best conversion. And on the side I, you know, on the, on the side, I always worked on that on the affiliate side I noticed it was much comes, much more, much, much more tricky to do.

Speaker 1: 14:27

Now, in an ideal world I would say you have ppc, nseo working in tandem together and if you can nail it, then that is, you know, brilliant. But there are big challenges in pPC um, which, yeah, I decided I wasn't going to be the person specializing. I've got no regrets about specializing SEO, because a SEO, I think, is harder and because it is harder than PPC, that gives you an edge. It takes longer. Again, that gives you an edge because only so many people are going to be willing to put that effort in to um, wait to get that return. And yeah, obviously I think the payback on seo can be much greater in the long run than on ppc. So, yeah, to summarize, I prefer seo, but if I see opportunity ppc, then I'm always interested. But my long-term strategy will always be SEO. So anyway, that's it from me this time. So look forward to seeing you next time and, yeah, see you then.

Speaker 1: 15:27

Before I go, I just want to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at keywords people use that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Speaker 1: 16:05

Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel five on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.