Myth: SEO Is Simply Pay-As-You-Go

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: SEO is simply pay-as-you-go.

Not true! There's actually a huge difference between pay-per-click and SEO, or search engine optimization.

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and I'm going to talk about pay-per-click advertising and search engine marketing, as well as search engine optimization (or SEO), and how these can be done more effectively and how they can help you grow your business.

One of the things that I hear sometimes is that SEO or search engine optimization is pay-as-you-go, which means that it's simply a matter of more dollars in resulting in more visitors to my website. The more dollars I put in, the more visitors I instantly get to my website.

Well, that's just simply not true. And a lot of times people confuse what is called pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization or SEO. Both are ways to get people to your website who are online searching for a service provider. But the two models work very, very differently.

Pay-per-click is exactly what it sounds like; it means I am paying the search engine to have somebody click on the link that leads to my website. In that kind of model, it is true in a sense that the more dollars I pay for clicks, the more people I'm going to get to my website. With a pay-per-click model like Google AdWords—that’s a very common example of a pay-per-click type of advertising—the more money I pay, the more people I’m going to get as a kind of a general rule. And as soon as I stop paying, I'm going to stop getting people to my website.

Search engine optimization works very, very differently. Search engine optimization means doing a whole lot of technical things (which I'm not going to get into) to make the search engines think that your website is the best result for people who are online searching for a service provider. Therefore, when somebody goes in and searches for the kind of business that you provide, the search engine is going to display you as the best link. You're not paying to be put in that position—at least not directly. You're not paying the search engine to be put in that position, but rather you've done a whole lot of work to make the search engine consider you as the best result for certain people.

Now with SEO, you're not going to see an immediate result. It usually takes time to do the work to get your website to the place where it is seen as one of the best options by the search engine. But once you get there, it's very easy to maintain that position if you keep doing the work. You can stay ahead of the competition at a much lower overall cost than with the pay-per-click campaign.

Now the funny thing is, even with a pay-per-click campaign—although it is a model where if I pay more, I get more traffic—most of the pay-per-click advertisers give quality scores to the campaigns and the ads and the web pages, which means that there can be as much as an 800% difference on Google AdWords with the amount of traffic you're getting for your campaign with the exact same budget, depending on how well it's done.

So, one person may be running a Google AdWords campaign spending $3,000 a month and getting half of the visitors that somebody else is getting on a budget of $1,000 a month, because the one who’s investing $1,000 a month is doing it right, and doing it really, really well, with high quality scores, whereas the person who’s spending $3,000 a month is just throwing money at the wall and it's not getting nearly as much result.

Every day, there are hundreds of people online searching for you and the service you provide, and I want them to find you. So this is not a simple pay-as-you-go model, but rather it's a matter of figuring out what is the best strategy, short-term and long-term, for your business—whether to use a pay-per-click search-engine-marketing campaign, or to use search engine optimization campaign, or both—and to do them in such a way that you get the maximum result for your investment, to make your website effective as your number 1 employee.