Conversions for Organic Traffic the same as for PPC Campaigns?
October 11th, 2007 by Marc UhligI recently read this quote in the Marketing Sherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2007:
Organic and paid clicks convert at fairly similar rates. If you can get a good organic ranking for critical keywords, your resulting traffic will be far higher than all but top position paid campaigns (”PPC”) on the exact same keywords. Therefore, if you can shift traffic to SEO, it’s better for your traffic volume and cost per click.
Well, not really, unless you focus your Search Engine Optimization efforts only on directly converting keywords, and leave out all those potential site visitors who don’t know yet that they are in buying mode. In printcountry’s case case for example we optimized the site for keywords like “free hp printer driver download“, it’s easier to get a good ranking for these kind of keywords compared to critical keywords where you might have to face way more competition depending on your industry.
The traffic generated by those keywords is less likely to convert as the visitor is obviously not in buying mode yet, but maybe there is still a chance for a conversion. It’s easy to generate traffic with not directly related keywords and when you have enough of them it makes totally sense, this traffic is almost free!
Of course you wouldn’t run a Pay-Per-Click Campaign on these keywords.
So no, for a well optimized page and a well set up PPC Campaign conversions won’t be the same, as you target way more keywords with SEO.
Tags: Online Marketing, organic traffic, ppc, SEO