Financial sector – corporate SEO or PPC?

Have you ever been told, that SEO is a better strategy than Pay-per-click advertisement? Well, lets dive into that:

During my work experience, I have been witness of at least 3 tries, to build up a big SEO strategy in corporate environment. And now I have arguments for all those SEO companies who tried to reach me and convince me, that it’s the best way. I always believed them, as I personally don’t like the paid links on searches and always go for the “organic” ones.

So generally, the benefits of SEO are:

• long term strategy
• bringing out the most relevant traffic at the relevant time
• most converse traffic (if optimized for the right words)
• more trustful links, than the paid ones
• costs are not dependent on number of clicks
• presence on search is not affected by actual spent or strategy

Now we dive in.

If you are not a startup, but a grown up corporate environment, your primary goal is not to grow as fast as possible, or market capitalization but you are focused more on predictable growth, keeping your costs low and margins as high as competition allows. So to keep track of your costs, you have to defend your costs and show the financial benefits. And that’s where SEO is starting to loose.

In my experience, you need to take to an account into your business case:

1. Relevant traffic – to build up relevant traffic (focused on people in decision process) in highly-competition environment, you need to optimize your current pages and build up many more or start with huge link-building. (one-time costs + SEO revision each time you publish anything)
2. Engaged traffic – visitors would not buy at first sight. So to keep the traffic engaged and get repeating visits, you have to publish regularly, with content quality same as other “independent” servers. (1 or more FTEs, experts on topic)
3. Time of content manager – to handle all this new stuff on your pages.
4. Time of compliance and legal – to assure your content is within boundaries.
5. Time of management – each topic will resonate with your management, or even with whole hierarchy.
6. SEO – you need an agency or in house expert. Despite this fact, you will always be on search behind PPC. SEO could also degrade quality of contents, which conflicts engaged traffic).
7. Longtail or core keywords? – Longtail won’t probably repay you (more content on smaller amount of traffic) and for high-competitive keywords will be costly to reach first positions, plus your win won’t hold forever – competition changes, market changes, search algorithm changes.

Even if you manage to bring the most relevant traffic in decisive process, the financial products (except start-ups) are commoditized across the market. That means, that after reading your page, the person would still like to compare the options he have and probably will go for lower price if not a fan of brand or has some specific reasons to buy from you. And he’s one click away from “independent” agregators or pricing comparation web pages.

So when you count in this risky and costly strategy and compare it to pretty straightforward funnel for PPC, immediate effect, real-time reporting with cost/revenue per unit for management who approves the budget for next time period, it’s probably an easy choice.