Are you considering using Pay Per Click (or PPC) advertising to grow your online sales? While PPC advertising channels like Google’s Adwords or Facebook Adverts has the benefits of immediate traffic and can cope with seasonal events, it is also very expensive and complicated to run.

Adwords and SEO (search engine optimisation) are competing and complimentary online marketing strategies. In Adwords, you bid for position on the search results pages against your competitors. The budget required is generally well over $500 – and most likely over $,1000 per month and few small businesses can afford it.

SEO works to bring your web site up higher and higher on the organic or unpaid results on the search results pages and a monthly budget of $300- $500 is required of a 6 month period. Ideally, SEO would be ongoing.

Five Reasons to Think before you Pay of Adwords

1. Adwords is really expensive
   Especially since April 2016 this year when Google changed the page layout of its search results pages to remove the right-hand column of ads, thereby reducing the number of ads displayed per page load and making those remaining more expensive to bid for.
2. No audit of click fraud
   What say your competitor saw your ad and clicked on it? Who pays for that? Google says they have a way to monitor and mitigate “click fraud”, but honestly, how can they? They won’t disclose how they do this, so we cant test their claim. It would not take too much effort to make clicks on Adwords ad appear to be authentic.
3. No investment in your site
   While you are distracted monitoring daily bids and monthly budgets in Adwords, you are missing the biggest opportunity: your website. You could be investing time in new content, on-page optimisation, new inbound links and myriad of other strategies to funnel traffic to your site… for free.
4. People tend to ignore sponsored ads
   A recent survey revealed that 82% of people claimed to ignore sponsored listings when searching via Google. Think about it; do you tune out advertising when you search on Google or post a status update on Facebook? When you are truly task focused, you never look at ads. One web marketing company recently said:  Overall, the study finds that online ads are ignored by the largest share of respondents (82%)  …the survey indicates that banner ads are ignored by the largest share of respondents overall (73%), followed by social media ads (62%) and search engine ads (59%). In each case, the propensity to ignore ads rises alongside age – by a significant degree. (source)
5. People are sceptical of advertising
   People have become sceptical of advertising, including PPC. Marketing efforts are looked upon negatively because people know that you are trying to sell them something. And people don’t like to be sold or having advertisement constantly presented when they are trying to surf the web, pay a bill or browse status updates on their favourite social networks.

Summary: Adwords and PPC advertising are becoming more and more expensive and are out of the reach of smaller companies. SEO activities, like building content, building inbound links and directory listings persist far beyond the month they were created in… and cost half the price.

Adwords is renting the house: SEO is buying the house.

Print to PDFPrint to Paper