SEO Battles : SEO vs FB

Quotes

• “We dont look at it as SEO vs. paid channels, we think of it as with. Generally, these channels complement and work off each other. If I was to talk about time though, theres definitely a question of how much time you put into it.” -Lillian

• “We are very data-driven so we do tests with different channels, different messages, different landing pages, and we also analyze our SEO traffic at the same time so we can justify investing in different areas based on the data that we have.” -Lillian

• “Generally, I would recommend marketers to have an end in mind. What are you looking to achieve? This should always come back to your company objective and whether or not your target audience is on those channels.” -Lillian

• “Social is tricky because it is an area where people arent necessarily looking to buy stuff. So in order to get a direct response, it is much harder. However this is not to say that it is not possible.” -Lillian

• “Thats an important point even though it might seem obvious. The users mindset when they are searching is different than when they are consuming content on social media, when theyre stumbling across your ads. One is meant to be an active experience.” -Ben

• “On the flip side when youre looking at paid social, you can interject your content in an ad format into the users feed. Theyre not actively looking for you.” -Ben

• “With paid social, you can actually do research on a demographic basis so theres enough information on peoples profiles to actually figure out how big your audience size is and who they are. With paid search, youre really talking about keyword research and this is the other end.” -Lillian

• “If youre working with social from a paid perspective, the key is to really look into the backend. To look into the ads platform that are there for you, to figure out how big is the target audience, how can I split this target audience and figure out what messages resonate with who.” -Lillian

• “Understanding the intent is really the key part here. When youre talking about SEO, someone has some intent there as they are actively searching. When youre thinking about paid social, they are passively browsing the internet. It is a browse as opposed to a search experience so the mindset is different.” -Ben

• “One of the ways that Ive seen marketers be successful with their paid social effort is to target and re-target people they know are interested in their products or services. Taking email addresses, pixels that have been fired, the key paid visits, and creating an audience that you want to retarget based on their experience with your products and services, or creatinglook-alike audiences based on people that have converted. You cant really do that in SEO.” -Ben

• “I think that to be effective in paid social, there are actually some similarities to SEO in the sense that, there is this term de jour for marketers thesedays, its called pixel seasoning. I have to get a certain amount of traffic to my website to get my pixel to fire to recognize where the people I want to target, re-market to, create a look-alike their audience from and that requires time.” -Ben

• “It takes time to develop a big enough audience to then retarget them and with SEO, it takes time and maturity too.” -Ben

• “Every organization is different. From my side, I always take a step back and look at the big picture. So yes we could laser focus, we could spend $50,000 on Facebook this month and we have the headcount of SEO which costs me $15,000 this month. It looks like SEO is cheaper and you could take it dry like this but I like to step back and ask where do my conversions come from? Mostly its amix.” -Lillian

• “There is a lot of It depends but generally, I think its healthy to keep a perspective on how people buy and its usually a combination of many different things.” -Lillian

• “When you go into the cost of the channel, heres how I think about it. SEO, youre looking at an overhead cost. Youre looking at your content production and its slightly variable but if youre hiring a writer, its a fixed cost. Youre looking at technical headcount, you need somebody to optimize your website, you have engineers, developers, you have to plug your cost there but there is no variable media cost. So often times people think about SEO as the three channel.” -Ben

• “With paid social, people focus on just the media. Well it cost $25,000 if we run our ads, and we got 25,000 leads so we have a dollar per lead. In reality, there are either headcount cost or agency cost. Here in US, an agency fof PPC for paid social is probably somewhere between 3 and on the high end, 25 grand a month depending on the volume that youre spending on how complex your campaigns are. But youre looking at thousand to tens of thousands of dollars to run those campaign which is the equivalent of another headcount.” -Ben

• “There is that variable media cost which to me is the fundamental difference between these two campaigns. And when you think about whats less expensive or whats more expensive, they can actually come out as awash. Really what matters is you could throttle paid social up and spend more media, potentially buy more volume. But no matter what youre doing with social, youre creating a toll booth. You have to spend a dollar of media to get any return as opposed to with your SEO traffic, you create your content and there is zero media cost and that could potentiallybe more valuable over time.” -Ben