Rand Fishkin has pointed out that pay per click advertising is getting the lion’s share of spending over SEO despite the fact that PPC ads only get 20% of the clicks. The Search Engine Optimization Journal shares two reasons why this is probably true. I’d like to add two more reasons.
In the early days of search engine optimization there were companies that sprung up to sell SEO as a service. They did fairly well. Not as well as SEO companies do today, obviously, but given the market conditions at the time, it was quite respectable. Then, PPC came along and pay per click providers started springing up.
Some of the same companies that had been successful selling SEO services also started selling PPC services. They had a natural authority on the subject and credibility based on their success as SEO providers. But another thing happened due to the success of early SEO providers, namely, shoddy and shady SEO practitioners selling snake oil and duping noobs by overcharging and underdelivering on results. That gave SEO a bad name and caused many webmasters to take a different view of the industry as a whole. That’s one reason.
The other reason is because PPC providers have done a good job of convincing companies that pay per click advertising is effective. In truth, it is. With pay per click advertising you can target the type of customer you are looking for and track your results so much more easily. More often than not, you can achieve very effective marketing results much quicker with pay per click than with SEO. And that’s why companies are spending the money on pay per click advertising.
Of course, you don’t hear me complaining.
