Nick from Search Engine Optimization Journal says it short, sweet, and right on, Is Organic SEO Really Your Best Option?
For years SEO practitioners have been proclaiming the virtues of organic SEO. It’s free. It’s easy. It’s not PPC. Etc. By the same token, PPC experts have been signing the praises of PPC – it’s fast, it’s dynamic, it’s targeted traffic, and it’s not organic SEO. Does it really matter?
Personally, I think that your Internet marketing efforts should all work together. It’s not a matter of SEO vs. PPC. It’s more a matter of whether or not you are targeting your traffic through the tools that are available to you, and organic SEO is one tool at your disposal. And it’s a valuable tool.
Organic SEO is about targeting the keywords that are important to your business and achieving business results for your targeting efforts. There’s more to it than simply picking keywords out of a vacuum and throwing them against the wall. The idea is to target the keywords that searchers looking for a service or product like yours would use to find it. If you can identify the keywords that the market thrives on then you can drive traffic to your website. You can do this through organic SEO and PPC as well as through other avenues.
The only thing I might add is the power of digital PR, blogger outreach, and online engagement to help out your war of search placement; otherwise, this is the best I have read in quite a while.
This is not a game of panaceas, it is a game of content-creation, site architecture, organic SEO strategies, PPC, and all the rest, over time. SEO is about consistance, predictability, and is much more of a war than it is a battle.
Mind you, try not too lose to many battles along the way.
