Would You Rather be an EEL or a Shark?

Let’s say you have a hundred bucks to spend on Internet marketing this year, and you have to use either Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC).

You can’t use both; and you can’t use anything else, either.

Which one do you choose?

SEO or PPC?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I would choose PPC.

Importantly, I would make that choice only after all efforts to secure both forms of marketing had been exhausted. Obviously, doing both (and lots more besides that) is the right marketing approach.

In this hypothetical realm, though? Again, I say PPC.

PPC gets the nod only because it has more target ability than SEO.

But please, let me explain in more detail by way of a colorful, aquatic metaphor!

Free lunch?

With SEO, you optimize your website to please the almighty search engine industrial complex.

Chiefly, this means your web text has been subtly riddled with keywords than lay a path, like popcorn in the dark forest, to your storefront.

But after you do that, what do you do?

Do you know what you do?

You wait.

You wait for the business to come to you.

In our aquatic environment, your SEO campaign is like the big, ugly, camouflaged eel that sits stoic for hours with its mouth agape, waiting for lunch to swim by so he can chomp down.

Oh, you’ll be ready, sure. You’ll be ready when lunch swims by. But still, you have to wait for that moment to arrive.

PPC, on the other hand, is a different breed of hunter.

In fact, compared to SEO, PPC is a shark.

For one thing, a shark doesn’t wait for lunch to swim by -- a shark goes out and gets it and eats it and then immediately starts looking for the next meal.

It’s that proactive, forward moving dynamic that makes pay-per-click my best bet over SEO.

With PPC, I can choose my own hunting grounds, as it were.

If, for example, I want to PPC advertise on just a small, local scale, I can do so because PPC allows me to direct my campaign to within, say, a 20 mile radius of my place of business.

Sure, with SEO I’ll mention my street address on my site, once maybe twice. But with PPC, all of my clicks will come from browsers within 20 miles of that street address.

Now that’s targeted marketing.

And that’s why, in my view, PPC trumps SEO. That one dynamic -- “target ability” -- means that much.

I simply need to have it in my marketing mix! I need to have that ability to set my sights in different directions. I need to be able to move off in any direction, and move fast. I need to be able to turn on a dime if a business situation requires it.

SEO, I feel, doesn’t give me those more exhilarating feelings of marketing motion, especially forward motion, like PPC does.

I mean, with PPC, I can change my keywords, I can change my geographic target, I can increase my reach in many ways, I can do lots of things, I can really shake things up (especially if something isn’t working).

But when you apply this dynamic to my “choose one or the other” scenario… what would I do if I had gone all-in with SEO instead of PPC?

Rewrite my website?

I don’t think so.

To be fair, though, it isn’t really fair to compare these two forms of Internet marketing. PPC is the fastest growing form of advertising on the Internet, after all. It’s an incredibly robust and successful (read: multi-billion dollar) industry. It’s pretty tough to compete with it right now.

But should you employ SEO?

Of course!

Frankly, you’re mad if you don’t have your website optimized. It practically goes without saying. But that’s not all you can do. You need to do a lot more than that.

And that’s what PPC gives you -- A lot more!

Entrepreneur and outdoor photography adventurer Caroline Melberg is President and CEO of Small Business Mavericks, a division of Melberg Marketing. She has over 20 years of experience creating marketing communications materials and writing copy for some of the largest and most successful companies in the world. Her small business columns are syndicated online, and she publishes the popular eZines, Blue Chip Tips: The Secrets of Blue Chip Marketing...Revealed! and Small Business Maverick Secrets: How to Market Your Local Small Biz Online (and Off!) Learn Maverick Marketing secrets you can use immediately to find new customers and increase your sales. Get your FREE subscription at www.SmallBusinessMavericks.com.

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Would You Rather be an EEL or a Shark? - To learn more about this author, visit Caroline Melberg's Website.

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