Great article in the Wall Street Journal on July 1 (http://bit.ly/9gur3R) regarding the use of key words and their impact on sales.
Long-story short, the article talks about how one company did a pay-per-click strategy around key words and it worked and another company tried it and failed. My take is very simple: Don’t do pay-per-click unless you absolutely know the words you’re going to buy are absolutely perfect. The right strategy is to be at the top of the rankings based on the quality of the information on your website. Yes, it takes more time, and yes, it takes more work, but in the end, people place a lot more weight on organic search results than the pay per click results.
I beg to differ with you slightly. Certainly, organic search is going to lead to a higher volume of clicks – but is it quality volume? Study after study suggests that paid search generates a better quality click (higher conversion rates.) There’s also a great misnomer that organic search is less expensive to accomplish. On the surface, this is true…but if you’re talking about small businesses, they don’t have the time or the expertise or the budget to either do SEO themselves or hire it done; and if hiring it done, it can be quite expensive….so that “free organic” argument is basically rendered un-defendable because successful SEO demands full-time attention, which commands a full-time investment.