SEO will take ages if you are lazy
Comments(6)A Dealer.com spokesperson, Mike Dececco, commented earlier this week that PPC is faster than SEO, and specifically, “SEO will take ages.”
If you’re having a special sale, or you’re offering a lower price than your competitor, adding it to your SEO will take ages to show up compared to PPC where you can execute your ideas in real time and measure their results.
http://www.drivingsales.com/blog/dealerdotcom/2008/12/09/choosing-your-ppc-vendor-will-you-have-control/#comment-15
Within four hours of his comment being posted, Paul Rushing claimed the number one spot (in Google) for dealer.com search engine marketing.
SEO may take ages if you do not understand
If you are not very good at optimizing documents for search, you may not have learned how quick Google Blog Search now indexes new blog posts. Paul was able to rank within hours of Mike’s comments because Paul knows this. Google’s Matt Cutts called this concept “minty fresh indexing” when he posted about how impressed he was with the speed more than one year ago in August 2007.
I am sure Mike is a good guy. I do not know him, but I do not think SEO is his job. He may have just had a little too much of the Google kool-aid.
When Google visited us the last time in VT they explained that if you are listed in the paid section, the SEO section and the local business listings you have an 80% greater chance of…
http://www.drivingsales.com/blog/dealerdotcom/2008/12/09/choosing-your-ppc-vendor-will-you-have-control/#comment-15
Of course Google is going to recommend pay-to-play PPC. I was similarly unamused when DealerRefresh posted that more paid listings on car search results is “a great win for dealers” last week (and I commented there saying so).
Does anyone remember that it used to be free to have your link at the top of Google if you knew how to work for the position? SEO does not take ages if you put some time into studying the medium you are trying to manipulate. SEO may not scale well for a giant website host that has thousands of customers. SEO may take ages if you do not care to learn or implement the fastest way to get content indexed and ranking.
When search engine pay-per-click advertising began, the programs sounded like this to me:
Does your website suck in our search engine? Do you want your links way up here like these guys? You can pay us a tax now instead of learning to no longer suck!
Now, search engine advertising has reached critical mass, and search engine fans are having trouble sorting out the best practices because listening to the search engine’s advice is easy and attractive press for any business. “Google came to our business,” sounds great. “SEO will take ages,” sounds lazy.
Another thing that many PPC fans will not mention if they know is the demographic of the “Heavy Clickers”
That medium is probably best reserved for chasing credit leads or building a list for giveaway promotions.
It appears that the objective of this post was taken way out of context. Mike’s blog, where you took his comment from, was written about things to look for when selecting a PPC vendor. His post did not at all talk about how SEO is better or worse than SEM.
Your proof of it taking 4 hours to rank for a word does prove that you are a skilled SEO engineer. It does prove that words can be ranked for quickly. However, it should not be thrown out as an insult to Mike. As you can tell by reading the full context of his words, his point was that PPC is nimble, and quicker (particularly for most car dealers since that was the audience he was talking too).
The fact that it took you 4 hours to rank for a word that that could be purchased in 4 minutes doesn’t prove Mike was off note.
I think this post is mis-guided. Most agree that both a PPC and SEO campaign are best when tied together. I know Mike is a huge advocate of both, as evidenced by his writings. I don’t think it’s fair to diminish that. On the flip side, Paul you did an incredible job of organically ranking for a word very fast, I believe even mike would call that commendable.
You can see mikes full post here:
http://www.drivingsales.com/blog/dealerdotcom/2008/12/09/choosing-your-ppc-vendor-will-you-have-control/
Jared, thanks for your comments. I don’t feel that I am insulting Mike, and (probably since I wrote it), I don’t feel that this post is misguided.
I have linked to Mike’s writing and comments twice already, so I also don’t agree that I am distorting the context. Anyone could click the links above to find the drivingsales location that you linked again here in the comments.
Jared, I just noticed you dropped the trackback to this post on the article I am discussing on your site, drivingsales. Take your ball and go home, why don’t you.
Corey, thanks for the mention in the article. I always enjoy reading your opinions.
You are right, if you know SEO you can get to the top of the SERPS quickly just as Paul has demonstrated. However, it would be more difficult to do this for several keyword or keyword phrases at one time (unless you had the money and resources ) if a dealer was to run a short term promotion.
What about dealers that do not have a Paul or the resources for truly effective SEO? Not to mention a dealer website platform that is SEO friendly.
Believe me, I totally agree that dealers have and will continue to overlook the importance and value of SEO. This is what made me say “a great win for dealers”. Having the ability to display relevant inventory on the first page of a google search could help the dealers that do not have a strong SEO presence. These could be the same dealers that are also paying big $$ for other listing services.
Thanks again Corey for an interesting post.
I really enjoy when website and search engine relationships like this one are discussed. With the help of Mike and Paul’s writings this week, some readers of these websites have a chance to observe and draw their own conclusions. I honestly do not feel this is insulting or even about specific people so much.
Hi Jeff. As usual, I enjoy your insight. I agree with everything you have stated. You question the time, money and what else is required to reach the eyes of searching shoppers. To expand on your thought experiment about resources–Pay per click ads on search engines may be more affordable or accessible (than optimization) to a business owner in the position of buying one or both (in-house or otherwise). I feel buying traffic should be cheaper than buying traffic growth. If a dealer’s short term goal can be satisfied only with a pay-per-visitor advertising program, the magnitude of this ad spend is directly related to the lack of the website’s ability to attract the desired traffic.