Selling SEO is getting really tough down here in Australia most companies are outsourcing link building to india and pakistan, while offering pay per month fees of $250 or less.

So I’m with ed – why try and convince clients about SEO for a low paying contract when I can ump my efforts into my own landing pages and blogs and make more cash?

Finally, I think the industry really needs some regulations and common standards – rather than all of us running around the google flame chanting crazy spells to make it rain. (I dont mean offend any native americans here – it is a good visual for the SEO industry!)

Hope you’ll add my feed to your reader .

Listen, when it comes to SERPS, I’d take great organic results any day over PPC, but I don’t think its a big stretch to say that if you have to deliver eyeballs, it’s easier and faster with PPC.

As you wrote in this very article, “only doing SEO can have you waste months optimizing for keywords that convert less well than others you could have targeted!” Agreed.

As to your simplistic dismissal of SEO, you believe perhaps that the sites rankign on money keywords in the head got there by fluke?..

What a ridiculous premise: Of course it’s better to show up first in organic search. And probably in some cases you’d get better conversions through organic search click throughs. But there’s a reason the vast majority of money goes to PPC: because most clients don’t have time to wait around to realize the vague promise of possibly better results in some obscure long-tail search several months down the road. Isn’t this obvious?

Paul, that’s interesting data. I guess it depends on the measurement method. Thanks for sharing the link and your personal experience!

My experience in employment industry is similar. Paid traffic is around 10% better in terms of conversion, time on site and bounce rate.

Very interesting numbers! Luckily we’re all organic and have built our entire revenue stream around it.

We’re moving into PPC but it’s so difficult to compete with the big guys in categories like mortgage, insurance, etc.

Do you have any experience or thoughts in trying to find the competitive edge against someone with the higher margin in PPC?

António thanks for sharing. I’ve updated the post.

John – awesome work for you guys. You’re obviously real pros!

68% Organic and 32% PPC. Thats DOUBLE!

Industry is lead generation in Health Insurance.

14%, according to Avinash, if this is what you are looking for:

beussery.com/blog/index.php/2008/02/google-average-number-of-words-per-query-have-increased/

Thanks! I’ll finish all 30 days eventually – I keep thinking of fun things to code and getting sidetracked. Since I’ve been handing it all though not many folks are complaining

One of my smaller clients spends around the same amount per month on SEO as they do on PPC and PPC traffic generates approximately 10% of the total traffic while organic search engine traffic accounts for around 80% of the traffic, with the last 10% being referral/bookmark.

I don’t have access to what % of the traffic converted into sales at the moment but it is probably safe to assume the ROI on the SEO is better than that of the PPC.

The other interesting thing from the Sempo findings is that marketers are increasing the PPC/SEO budget by reducing print expenditure. Which is a pretty obvious course of action really but it is interesting how much they can save on marketing by doing this. We had another client that advertised in the national papers quite a lot, the adverts cost them thousands and by pulling just 2 of the adverts they managed to cover all the SEO and PPC costs. With the help of the SEO/PPC they managed to double the enquiries they received within a few months. So even though the ROI on PPC is less than SEO it is still considerably better than that of traditional media.