Your name just came up in a conversation I had with Fred Miller earlier today. Thanks for visiting my blog and for your comment. I agree that PPC can be especially helpful at the beginning of a campaign. I would say, however, that if your PPC campaign is generating a positive ROI that instead of scaling back, you buy as many more profitable clicks as you can for your business no matter what your SEO efforts are producing.

Thanks!
Adam

I would add though that whether you use SEO or PPC, it’s wise to be collecting email addresses on your website so you can follow up with past visitors via email marketing. So while the train may stop, you should leave a car or bus at the station so the passengers’ journey doesn’t completely grind to a halt (not sure if that analogy makes sense or not, but I’m going with it!).

Anyway, this is a great discussion and the bottom line is it shows that there is not one silver bullet when it comes to Internet marketing. There are pros and cons to all the strategies out there and the best strategy is to use as many of them as possible.

As for cost, you’re right, there’s no such thing as a free click. Well, maybe there is for my website, because I’m doing my own work. But for my clients, they’d argue that their clicks aren’t free. If they were, I’d be out of business!

I like to compare an SEO campaign to a person pulling a freight train. It takes time to get it started and would be hell to get it rolling. But once it is, the amount of effort to keep it rolling is minimal. Traffic continues to come to a website even if the SEO “stops pulling”.

With PPC, the train can be immediately at cruising speed. Problem is, once you stop your PPC campaign, the traffic stops immediately. If there’s no SEO in place, the client is basically dead in the water.