Why Is PPC Management Called ‘Management’, But SEO Management Is Just ‘SEO’?

Every once in a while, we can’t help but sit back and look at our industry with a little amusement. We don’t often indulge in our more esoteric side, but this little tidbit floated around the office for a while and we had to share.

PPC “Management” vs. “SEO”
PPC Management is a growing industry in which people who have mastered the arts of pay-per-click marketing sell their services to companies who need fast profit and are willing to take less profit as long as it comes now. Organic SEO is, in some ways, it’s opposite — it’s the slow, high-RoI way of getting traffic to your site.

But both entail the same basic elements: you have someone who knows how a particular process works who gets paid to engage that process for their client. Sure, pay-per-click marketing has specific tools and interfaces you have to use, and you create nice tidy little entities called “campaigns” on those tools — so it may feel like you’re ‘managing’…but the actually good SEO companies do the same thing with SEO. They might not use tools that Google or Bing designed to organize their campaigns, but they darn sure organize campaigns and use complex tools to make sure everything ends up recorded, analyzed, and optimized.

So here’s the going theory around here: it changes because the audience changes. When you get right down to it, most businesses that are going to pass up PPC (‘quick profit’) in exchange for SEO (‘long-term RoI’) are established small businesses. They don’t need the cashflow that new companies do (which is why you’d choose PPC in the first place) — they have proven customers. What they do need is a solid entry into the Internet marketplace, even if it takes six months to get there.

They also tend to be more laid-back about their approach to the Internet. They don’t want to be pushed hard to ‘optimize’ — let that fall under the ambiguousness of “SEO”.

On the other hand, the audience for PPC tends to be hard-working, overburdened entrepreneurs who are looking for someone who take some of the load off of their backs. Thus, hiring a “manager” who can look after things without needing further watching is exactly what they need.

We don’t know if this is accurate or not, but maybe we can get some thoughts provoked. Sometimes, that’s worthwhile for it’s own sake.