In search engine marketing, you have to pick your battles very carefully. Sometimes concentrating on SEO makes more sense, other times you have to spend your money on paid search advertisings. The table below gives a break down on these two tactics.

SEO

Paid Search ads
What is it? Search Engine Optimization optimizes your website for higher organic rankings on search engines (Google, Yahoo or Bing.) Pay-per-click or banner ads that go through Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing platforms.
How resource intensive is it? A SEO strategy can be resource intensive task, especially for a SME. Paid search advertising requires nominal effort only.
How quickly can I see results? Results are slow (from weeks to months)

SEO listings can take a few weeks to materialize. A full SEO campaign can even take a year to be fully realized.

 Almost instantaneously (within days)

Search advertising can take a day to be setup and go live. But, once you turn ofF your budget, your ads are gone.
How well can I target my audience? Broad Targeting

Organic searches are hard to target to a specific audience.

 Specific targeting

Ads can be targeted to specific demographics, geographics, time-of-day, negative word filtering, etc.
How much does it cost? Higher startup, but low monthly costs.

Startup:

  • SOHO ≈ €1,000
  • SME ≈ €15,000

20% for monthly maintenance.

 Medium startup, but high running costs.

Startup:

  • SOHO ≈ €500
  • SME ≈ €5,000

200% for monthly advertisement costs.
What are the involved steps? Spans your marketing, sales, and perhaps technical team. Some of the steps involved are:

  • Design a SEO game plan.
  • Migrate your site to a CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal).
  • Submit sitemap to various search engines.
  • Train marketing Staff and implement changes together.
  • Improve your rankings
 Only requires a few marketing personnel. Some of the steps involved are:

  • Research keywords
  • Establish advertising accounts
  • Set up ad campaigns.
  • Apply conversion codes to track performance.
  • Track and update ad campaigns.
Do I need to hire external help? Yes, better to get an SEO
consultant

SEO is a very complex and rapidly changing field. It’s best to hire someone who has current market knowledge.

 Good to have, but not necessary

Paid campaigns are easier to run and master. But if you don’t have the analytical marketing team then hire a PPC expert.
Summary SEO is a good overall lead-generation tool.

It CAN NOT be  used for a specific campaign.

SEO takes longer to trickle through, but the investment pays off with a brand image.

Visitors trust organic searches more than paid listings.

 Search ads are good for specific campaigns that have a start and stop date.

You CAN NOT build a brand using search advertising. It will just be too expensive and eventually break your bank.

PPC advertising has a life span of your budget. Turn off the budget, you lose your ad traffic.

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What is the first image that comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘Finnish’? If you are not familiar with Finland, Finns or Finnish culture maybe you will see an idyllic snowed landscape with smoking chimney cottages and possibly some reindeers wandering around. On the other hand if you are close enough to this Nordic country surely some immaculate sauna, hi-tech mobile phone or salmon over rye bread images will fly in your mind. But what does Google Images think about keyword ‘Finnish’?

That is what @taalto wanted to show on an experiment that compares the results Google Images gives for ‘Finnish’ and ‘Swedish’ keywords. Images speak by themselves, while for the ‘Finnish’ search pictures showed are:

the results for ‘Swedish’ search are:

After this experiment an initiative was born from Finnish Advertising Agency W. Steinmann to try to revert these negative tendencies. They used a simple SEO technique of tagging uploaded photos -  whether the file name, alt-tag or surrounding text, with the keyword ‘Finnish’. Perhaps the simplicity of the technique is the reason why its often overlooked.

The Campaign for Finnish Image(s) aims at improving the quality of pictures going around the web, reflecting more realistically the modern life in Finland. Can a simple SEO practice make the difference on how Finland is perceived? At least through search engines eyes. This is a job not only for the Finnish authorities, but for anyone who lives or loves this magic land.

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Since my last post on new sales tools, I’ve received some comments about the value of PDFs over interactive portable documents – primarily the value derived from search engines ability to index PDFs. The point is that if you place your marketing collaterals online (such as brochures, datasheets, beat sheets, whitepapers and fast track papers) then you want these to be indexed by search engines as well.

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