Over the years, I’ve helped many early-stage startups gain traction through SEO campaigns, and I know many Search Engine Land readers have done the same with PPC.
Often, restrictions on budget and/or staff resources mean you can’t take on both types of campaigns at once – you’ll have to pick one.
I’m reminded of this a couple of times a week by folks reaching out to me personally or on Slack groups or other forums to ask whether they should invest in SEO (or paid) in the very earliest stages of launch.
Without more information to go on, there’s a series of questions I ask to help guide them to the right answer:
Do you need results now, or can you afford to be patient and build a foundation of steady growth?
Do you know your market and your ideal customer inside and out?
What does your list of target keywords look like?
How good (or bad) is your website?
Let’s look at possible answers to those questions – and how they should dictate your priorities.
1. What’s more important: fast or steady?
I bet you know where I’m going with this: if you need immediate revenue, PPC is a much better play than SEO (assuming you have a good PPC strategy). But the old caveat applies: PPC is ephemeral. You spend for every single click, over and over.
With SEO, of course, you’re building a foundation for growth that takes (best-case scenario) weeks to months to start seeing momentum, at least on Google.
(Note: You can and should diversify your bets and include platforms like TikTok, Reddit and Quora in your organic strategy, especially since content there can produce more immediate engagement.)
My usual pitch to brands mulling whether or not to invest early in SEO is three-fold:
Building an SEO baseline early on helps improve all your digital marketing initiatives (content, website architecture, site speed, conversion optimization) and develop a starting point of repeatable “free” traffic to your site.
SEO thrives on education and content, which are key for early-stage growth (you need to introduce yourself to people, after all, and start-ups often need to educate users on why they need an innovative new product or service.
SEO has compounding benefits that grow with time. When you start ranking on one keyword or building expertise for a certain category, it makes it easier to rank for the next keyword, so getting started early is better.
2. How well do you know your market and your ICP?
If you are certain you know your market cold (i.e., the competitors, the CPCs/CPMs, your company’s specific differentiators and why and to whom they matter), then there might be a little less of a case to be made for diving immediately into SEO. (Although you’d better be creating content that educates users on your differentiators.)
One of the big benefits of SEO is developing your position in the market, helping users understand who you are and how you fit in. You’re also establishing a nuanced feedback loop on what you might get wrong about the market and your most valuable users.
Both SEO and paid search will return data on things like:
Low impressions/CTR (your content isn’t resonating).
Time on page (your content’s not what the user is looking for).
Conversion rate (you’ve got the wrong offer for this funnel stage).
And more.
The difference is that SEO doesn’t require you to pay for empty clicks/CPMs to find this out.