SEO VS. PPC

SEO (search engine optimization):

The goal is to get your site to the top of the first page of Google for as many of your keywords/phrases as possible. There are 2 parts to this. On-Site SEO and Off-Site SEO. For the most-part your On-Site SEO was done and is being done as your site is created. It could and should be adjusted in the future as your services change and as data about your site becomes available to us through analytics that I'll be running. Off-Site SEO is the act of Link Building, Social Bookmarking, Directory Submission, Article Submission, Blog Commenting, etc., as necessary to raise your site in authority and search engine rankings.

In reality you can spend as much or a little as you want on SEO. The more you spend, the more time will be spent on your project, and the faster you will reach the top. But spend too little and you won't see much in the way of results. Spend too much and you'll be throwing away money; as once you've reached the top, you really can't go any higher. Note: As Google makes and changes the rules, nobody can guarantee first place ranking from SEO, but excellent results can be attained by people who know what they are doing. I'm pretty certain we can get excellent results.

The benefits of SEO is that most people will click in the free "organic" results first when they are looking for something, and that if you are on ranking high on Google it doesn't cost any more for 5000 clicks than it does for 50 clicks.

For a national campaign in a moderately competative industry, I'd recommend the following for Off-Site SEO:

Budget: $1200 monthly
Moderate: $1600 monthly
Aggressive: $2000 monthly

There is a minimum of a 6 month agreement for either plan you choose, as it takes time to see the full results, and most of the work cannot be performed to quickly without running the risk of getting banned by google. To dabble in SEO and only run it for a month or two would be throwing away your money.

PPC (Pay Per Click):

The goal is to bring more visitors to your site by paying for advertising (mostly in the sponsored links at the top of the Google page in peach, and on the right side of the page). With this option I can guarantee first page placement will occur for most of your keywords, usually within 24 hours of setting up the program.

The benefits of PPC are that the results are instantaneous and that people who click on the sponsored links usually know that they will be looking at a site that offers something for sale.

For a national campaign in a moderately competative industry, I'd recommend the following for a Google PPC campaign:

Budget: $800 monthly
Moderate: $1200 monthly
Aggressive: $1800 monthly

There is a minimum of a 6 month agreement for either plan you choose, as it takes quite a bit of time to set up the program correctly so that you are only getting targeted visitors and not throwing away your money, and the program will need to be tweaked and adjusted for the best results.

Ideally you will want to run both the SEO and PPC campaigns at the same time. That way you will get the immediate results of PPC, and the long term benefits of SEO. So you'd be looking at between $2000 - $3800 per month.