SEO drives 75% of search traffic, SEM less than 25%. But getting SEO budget is hard. Here's help.

Getting an SEO project underway is hard to do, especially if you are selling against PPC advertising projects.   But considering that SEO drives 75% of search traffic and SEM drives less than 25%, it's a problem worth solving.

Choosing the right SEO goals and getting buy-in are two important pieces of selling your SEO project. Another aspect, whether you're a consultant or work in-house, is selling your project when competing for budget with PPC campaigns.

The Easy Part of Selling PPC

A few factors make pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising projects attractive to budget managers. The biggest overall factor is that the model is familiar to them. It feels very similar to traditional ad spend, and even has some advantages:

1. There's a fixed connection between money spent and return. In other words, you spend some money, you measure the orders you get, and you do a ROI calculation. Any budget manager can get excited about direct response models that show a clear profit.
2. There's very little delay in PPC. Set up your campaign in the morning and start getting visitors to your site from it (and orders) tonight. From the point of view of an advertising budget, that's hard to beat.
3. It's easy to set up and implement tests and tweak your results. You can test and tune your campaigns very easily because of the responsiveness and measurability of the medium.

In short, not only is it similar in concept to traditional advertising, it's better. That's a hard thing to sell against.

The Hard Part of Selling SEO

Now let's look at what makes SEO a difficult sell:

1. You usually don't know when you will get initial results. One month? Six months?
2. You can't state with precision the size of the impact your SEO campaign. Ten percent traffic increase at six months? Thirty percent? Fifty percent? You just don't know.
3. Will there be an impact on conversion rate? Will the new traffic convert better or worse than the traffic you were getting before?

Worse still, the search engine algorithms could change in the same timeframe and obscure the impact of your campaigns. It should be noted that highly experienced SEOs can scope some of these factors out and give some shape to the campaign's potential return, but it's much harder than in the PPC world, and the accuracy will be lower.

Selling Your SEO Project

There are many reasons why SEO is a better investment than PPC, but the most compelling one is this...
Read the full article:  Selling SEO Projects Against PPC Campaigns - Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Comments

[Marc]

I think you can get a decent guesstimate as to how long before you see results with SEO. You just need to look at factors like age of a domain, your competition, and the overall niche. Its not 100 percent accurate or anything, but you can get a fairly accurate guess.