Who says a SEO agency shouldn’t do PPC marketing for itself?

We received a spam blog comment today on a personal blog maintained by one of our team members from a SEO company in Canada, trying to promote their own services while also inviting a listing/ article contributions for their website. One of the things that caught our attention was this sentence on the home page of their website: “You should not trust any SEO team that buys Google Adwords to advertise on Google; it shows they cannot do SEO.” How wrong could this SEO company be! We’d like to counter that digital marketing agency that uses Google Adwords (among other channels) to promote its own SEO services will most likely have a better understanding of online marketing and be much better positioned to provide holistic marketing advice to clients.

SEO is resource-intensive and therefore there are some limits to the terms that you can realistically rank and attract traffic for at any given time (even with a high-degree of automation). Running a Google Adwords PPC campaign lets marketers be visible for a host of terms that they would otherwise not be visible for.  So, if a SEO agency runs a PPC campaign to attract leads for its SEO services, it doesn’t mean that the agency is incompetent or incapable; it just means that not only is the agency pragmatic, it is also taking advantage of other marketing opportunities to grow its business. Would you rather trust a company that can help you uncover and exploit new opportunities or opt for a company that could be rather limited in its thinking?

We believe any company cannot/ should not rely on just one technique for its marketing/ lead generation efforts. This is particularly true if that one technique is SEO, considering that there will ALWAYS be a certain degree of unpredictability to SEO traffic. This is because there are far too many variables and unknowns for any agency to commit organic traffic and rankings with absolute certainty. In fact, if any agency claims to “guarantee” traffic, beware — some additional due diligence into the agency’s strategies and tactics will be in order!

The differences and relative opportunities, challenges and limitations of SEO and PPC are a recurring theme that we have covered in the past on our site. We’ll reiterate that in a separate post shortly; in the meantime, let’s just emphasise once more that it will be prudent to look at a broad-based digital marketing strategy that takes advantage of multiple channels and tactics rather than putting all eggs in one basket.