Many dedicated SEO companies are keen to get businesses on paid advertising campaigns because it generates an instant increase in traffic to the website, which is great for the SEO company because they look like they are doing a good job, but the trouble with this is that it isn’t sustainable. If you cut your pay-per-click or any paid advertising budget, you’ll see a drop in visitors. Hopefully some visitors will have become regulars to your site, but in most cases this unlikely to be a large proportion of your visitors.

An appropriate analogy for this is the difference between getting a mortgage and renting a house. If you rent a house, when you stop paying, you have nothing, whereas after paying your mortgage, you own a house at the end, of course a mortgage is a much bigger investment, but it’s likely to pay off in the long run.

If you wanted to get into the sustainable side of SEO, like having a mortgage, then you need to build natural interest in your website. Why would Joe Public want to visit your site? And importantly, why would he then recommend it to his friends? Of course, we’re not looking for verbal recommendations, but links to your website, which essentially serve the same purpose. Somebody thinks others should check out your site and thus they link to it, it might be that you have some great offers or it could be that you have an article that explains in detail an aspect of their article – this is the key thing.

Writing interesting articles does require an investment, the author’s time, as does providing inciting offers or unpaid link building, so those techniques should to be weighed up against paid advertising – I’m certainly not suggesting that paid advertising should be avoided in all situations, and it can certainly run side-by-side with other techniques. I’ll leave you with this thought: if you ever need to cut your advertising budget, what do you have left to rely upon for driving people to your website?

Image Credit: The Big Queue for the Louvre @ Flickr