This is a question that I’ve been asked several times in client meetings and at conferences. It’s a fair question, with many companies taking on both activities in their efforts to gain market share.
Recently there has been a noticeable shift of activity towards performance marketing campaigns, especially for e-commerce websites. The increase in popularity of social media along with the explosion of information online has accelerated the necessity for companies to capitalize on opportunities within these channels as much as possible. This means using more expensive tactics to drive traffic through various platforms versus relying solely on old-school methods such as SEO and PPC campaigns. This is also how local search seems to have come alive again for small businesses who want local customers out searching for them instead of spending thousands of off-line advertising dollars to get the same results."
What’s the difference between performance marketing and SEO? Performance marketers see opportunities in social media, display ads, retargeting, and search engine marketing. All of these tactics are more costly than traditional SEO due to impressions, clicks, and conversions being tracked vs. link building/anchor text ratios, keyword density, or link popularity being factored into search ranking algorithms. Whereas an example a campaign designed for a physical business with address location may have a performance marketing strategy in place that targets local customers by geo-targeting on sites such as Foursquare along with enhanced Google My Business data while performing PPC campaigns through Bing or Yahoo! Local listings. The end goal is to generate traffic people want to click through to the site, as well as convert from a social media post or display ad for product purchase.
Another factor is that SEO services are still being sold on performance and results in search rankings, which is no longer possible. As an example, if I sell you SEO services and we obtain 1st-page rankings for several keywords it doesn’t mean you will have more traffic than someone who ranks 2nd or 3rd page. The end goal of marketing has always been about conversions vs just having good enough rankings where people can find your website without any additional boosting efforts.
Now don’t get me wrong there are plenty of companies out there selling SEO these days where this hasn’t changed but with so many players competing against each other, it’s about the end results and not just ranking well. If you pay a company $5,000 for SEO services that are all they are going to report back to you “your rankings have improved” versus what I’ll tell you after optimizing your website which can be completely different if done properly.
There are also companies that specialize in performance marketing but don’t focus on SEO. These companies provide valuable services to their customers by managing PPC campaigns for them while scaling efforts across multiple platforms such as social media, display ads, and affiliate traffic building opportunities.
The difference between performance marketing and SEO used to be obvious but with the evolution of digital marketing techniques along with how companies sell these types of services it has become muddled over time. So clients ask me “what’s the difference between performance marketing and SEO?”. For me, the answer is simple. If I’m performing search engine optimization then my main goal is to bring you qualified traffic while providing value through quality content that can be found in a Google search as well as provide links pointing back to your website from other resources. After all, that occurs then we move on to optimizing conversion efforts by analyzing what would make customers more likely to buy from your business based on personas that are usually established during the keyword research and content creation processes.