One characteristic that great marketers have in common is the ability to think, envision strategy, and observe performance over a long span of time. It is a wonderful myth that short-term marketing results are most important and that if the short-term results are good, the rest will take care of itself.
There are two primary ways to develop traffic from search engines. Pay-per-click (PPC) and organic. PPC is instantaneous and can result in a lot of good short-term gains. A positive ROI in an Adwords campaign can make it hard to make the case for diverting funds to an organic SEO campaign.
Just think about what this means. When you stop running your PPC campaign, the leads stop coming in and any of your competitors can step in and start their own PPC campaign. There is no moat.
By developing high rankings in organic search, toiling month after month, you create something that is defensible. If you promote your site organically, it will maintain those rankings for some time and it will take a great deal of resources for your competition to supplant you.
The real value is found in the synergy between the two methods. You can use PPC to make sure that an offer converts before going to the trouble of ranking for a phrase. That way you can get all of the kinks out of the landing page prior and you won’t be left asking the question, “Why isn’t anyone converting?”
