Weaned from PPC
It’s a story I’ve had to tell many times in my career as a Google Real Estate Professional. So much so, that I believe that it deserves it’s own post so I can selfishly reference it in the future. Often times we have clients come to us that are 100% reliant on PPC (Google AdWords, or any other pay-per-click model). And they ask us ‘How can you help us? We’ve heard Organic SEO is expensive’. Well, it’s not cheap…seldom in life are great things ‘cheap’. What most people never take the time to equate for themselves is that PPC is the equivalent of RENTING your sites ranking spot. And Organic rankings are BUYING a home on Park Place!
Rent vs. Own
We all know that it makes more sense to own rather than rent right? Philosophically speaking this is usually the case (I realize there are exceptions to every rule). Most people want to ‘own’ their home and their car, because to rent them is usually equated to throwing your money away month after month. Well I hate to be the one to break it to you, but running your business by PPC only is the equivalent of renting space on the first page. Whereas Organic SEO costs associated with maintaining a first page ranking is about the same as home upkeep & normal maintenance costs.
Wouldn’t you rather Own your position on the web? Now I’m not saying that there’s no costs involved in maintaining those rankings. And don’t make the mistake of achieving top spots only to sit back and rest on your laurels! As with anything that is important you have to care and nurture it (cars, homes, business, & websites all need regular maintenance in order to operate at peak performance).
The Heatmap doesn’t lie
The heatmap AKA The Golden Triangle is a widely known and talked about eye-tracking study, which illustrates the need for Organic results. I know some of you are looking at this and thinking ‘Wait, that’s where my Paid results show up,’ while that may be the point. And this report does back up the fact that the top Paid results get the majority of the first looks, but they DON’T get the majority of the clicks. The top Organic result is the anchor for the ‘Golden Triangle’ and where we strive to put our sites!
Think of the search results page as a shopping mall. Think of the eye activity as foot traffic. In a mall, you have anchor tenants who attract the majority of traffic. Usually, malls try to have two or three anchor tenants distributed evenly around the perimeter of the mall so foot traffic is generated moving from anchor tenant to anchor tenant. All the other tenants take advantage of this by catching the attention of the foot traffic as they walk by.
The Google search results page has one anchor, and it’s usually in the upper left corner. The anchor is the number one organic result. That’s what we’re all looking for. Everything else is a detour on the way. Yes, Top Sponsored results get high visibility and a reasonable number of click throughs, but more often than not, it’s because they happens to catch our attention while we are looking for the top organic listing. With rare exceptions, we’re not looking for a sponsored result. ~Enquiro Eye Tracking Report
I’ll save you from having to read through the entire 106 page report, unless you want to, and share this:
Where the Clicks Happened:
*53.6% Organic (Owning your place on the web)
*27.6% Other
*11.7% Top Sponsored (Renter)
*5.1% Side Sponsored (Renter)
*1.96% OneBox (also attributed to Organic)
Even if you have an unlimited budget, the Organic Marketer will beat the best renter on Google! We’ve actually built in our own profit calculator (Brian says I have to wait to show it off – check back, it’s schweet!) We are to the point now – if you know how well you convert on any terms, we can tell you what 1st, 2nd, or 3rd places would net you!
Grow your OWN while RENTING
Whenever a business owner becomes aware. They are usually looking for a way to quickly remedy the situation. I hear “How fast can I stop using PPC and just be on the first page of Google Organically?” The short answer is I don’t know. We have to approach this answer on a case by case basis. Some clients have a budget for Organic so we can start working in the background whilst the PPC campaign continues on… until eventually we significantly reduce or even completely abandon PPC altogether. Now again, each case is different. If you have a high converting PPC campaign and have the budget to do it all, by all means – Go for it!
However more often than not, this is not the case. Business owners that become aware of the perpetual bleeding of money in order to stay afloat, don’t always have the resources to take on an entirely new campaign. So we have to do a delicate dance of sorts, moving from PPC strategically to Organic.
A Few Examples
One of the Inc500 companies I’ve worked for in the past had built their entire online presence by using Google AdWords. This is great if you can do it, and don’t mind throwing that money away renting your results every month. I was brought in to rank them Organically for some of the terms they were paying $75k a month for in PPC. I had some VERY stiff competition, for some seriously hard to rank for terms. However, after a few months of perseverance we found ourselves in the #3 position Organically. Right behind 2 multinationals with budgets 10x’s what I had to work with. The result? We were able to scale back from spending 75k a month to 35k (a 40k a month savings). Not only were we able to scale back more than 50% of spend we were also getting a 40% higher conversion rate!
In another case we had to work with the existing campaign funds from PPC to slowly move them to a strictly Organic diet. This was accomplished by continuing the current PPC campaign (only reducing in small areas as those funds were used to start building content and links for Organic rankings). Again the final results were a 90% decrease in PPC and any lost traffic from PPC was more than covered by the gains in Organic by a 45% overall increase.
Conclusion
The benefits of Organically ranking is not really in question…it’s a no-brainer. Now I know if any of my PPC friends are reading this, they’re probably a little heated up. No offense fellas. This is in no way meant to start an argument. More of an explanation of why we do what we do, how we do it sort of thing. Like I said earlier… Every site is looked at on a case by case basis. If you think that you should Own your rankings – pick up the phone and call me (360) 306-0591 M-F 9-5 PST please. I’ll gladly walk you through your sites possibilities. Come to the Organic side – We have cookies!
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