Ask HN: How much do you rely on Google Adword vs. organic growth? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much do you rely on Google Adword vs. organic growth?

7 pointsyoungdev4 comments

Just curious how many of you guys rely on PPC systems like google, fb, or bing vs. growing traffic organically?

Is one preferred over the other?

When comparing SEO to PPC the easiest comparison is to look at how PPC has instant results & can generate visitors early in a site launch in comparison to SEO. Similarly in terms of managing budget you can manage your budget and measure your ROI much more easily with PPC over SEO which often takes a much more long term approach (especially if you're going after generic competitive keywords)

- 86% of web searchers trust SEO listings more than sponsored PPC listings AND 85% of clicks resulting from a search are on the organic links rather than the paid ads.

- Although only 50% of web searchers are aware of the difference between organic and paid search results

However, PPC use declined 60% between 2007 and 2010 AND more importantly 50% of people arriving at a retailers site from paid ads are more likely to buy than those who came from an organic link.

In terms of selecting one method over the other then I know someone personally who runs a very successful bootstrapped ecommerce company which started on eBay and has since expanded into real stores - he now has over 100 employees & makes tens of millions in profit per year. His whole business has been generated via PPC although recently he has started doing SEO by hiring some in house SEO staff.

However, ideally you should be looking at implementing both strategies. SEO and PPC are both important & if you have an PPC ad slot and are #1 on Google then you have 2 of the first few results a user clicks on & from my experience - the first 5 results take up 88.1% of all clicks[1]

Statistics Used From: http://killerinfographics.submitinfographics.com/wp-content/...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3766000

My partner and I always thought that paid is great to start with then organic traffic should take over.

We have real difficulty getting results from organic traffic. We now are regularly number 1 or 2 on google organic search for our exact key phrase. We're seeing very little traffic and zero enquiries which is very disheartening.

However if we run a PPC campaign for the same keyphrase we get 20 - 50 enquiries per day (dependant on our budget) and 5 to 10 enquiries.

Our paid ad is above our own organic listing and the paid wins hands down every time. If we stop the ads, another ad beats us to the click.

I think ads are being clicked far more than we realise.

We would love to rely on organic traffic but only paid traffic gets results.

It depends on your business, work out what the average revenue per visitor is and from that derive how much you'd be willing to pay for an extra visitor.

If that amount is greater than the cost of PPC advertising then using PPC is a no-brainer.

I use both. Rather than rely on one or the other, they each have their own uses for specific things. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't. Reasoning varies a lot.

I should note that I don't think of organic traffic as purely SEO.

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