SEO Lead Gen vs PPC Lead Gen: Which One Converts More?

James Dooley: Today we’re going to be talking about PPC lead generation versus SEO lead generation. I’m joined by Kasra. We both have a lot of experience in both avenues. What’s your thoughts? James Dooley: I’d say the main difference is this: PPC can generate leads fast, but SEO delivers a better long-term return on investment. You can win with PPC if you have the right pay-per-click agency, but as you know very well, Kasra, there’s a lot of click fraud and you need to constantly build a strong negative keyword list. For me, I’m all in on SEO lead generation versus PPC. But what’s your take? Which one do you prefer? And is there a market for both? Kasra Dash: Yeah, so in certain markets, doing both makes sense. In others, only PPC makes sense. And in some, only SEO makes sense. For example, if you’re in a really tough industry to rank in — maybe you hired an SEO agency and they told you it’ll take 18 months to reach page one — then I’d definitely explore other ways of generating leads, which could be PPC. Another factor is whether you have an expert actually running your PPC campaign. Without someone doing weekly audits, providing reports, managing negative keywords, watching for click fraud, and monitoring conversion keywords, the campaign can easily bleed money. And some keywords you’re bidding on might not even turn into paying customers, so constant auditing is essential. With SEO, it’s slower than PPC, but the quality of inquiries is much higher. The likelihood of an inquiry turning into a paying customer is significantly better with SEO. But yes — SEO takes longer before the leads start coming in. James Dooley: For anyone looking for PPC leads or SEO leads, head over to FatRank.com — we actually do both. I’m not against running PPC to generate leads. If you go there, we’ll see what works best for you. For example, if you have an event happening next weekend, you’re not getting SEO rankings in time — in that case, we’d say you need PPC. At FatRank.com, we do both. We can audit everything and figure out what works better for your company. Head over to FatRank.com and we’ll help you decide, specifically for your industry, whether PPC or SEO lead generation is the better route.