SEO vs. Google Adwords

An associate, seeking my opinion, recently forwarded a post from her newsgroup which included the statement below :

"If you are able to achieve a good pagerank, you will have little need for a paid campaign through AdWords."

The author of this post is of firm belief that SEO is without question the single best way to attract customers to your Web site.

I ran a quick check of five popular retail ecommerce sites with pageranks from 6-10 and found Adwords ads on four of them. This seems dispute the statement above.

The determination of the credibility of the statement above is important for both me and my associate.

Advice would be appreciated.

Firstly, PPC and SEO are mutually beneficial. It's been shown that a high organic rank combined with a highly placed PPC ad can increase conversions because users gain a sense of familiarity with your brand faster than they normally would.

Also, PPC is instant so it covers SEO until it kicks in and also covers areas where you have no SEO (you can use ALL your keywords in your PPC campaign rather than having to choose a few phrases). I would thoroughly recommend doing both concurrently.

Secondly, Page Rank has got very little to do with ranking well on search engines, it's all about relevance, whoever said that to you doesn't know what they're talking about.

heh.... I like this question...

I run adwords on SERPs where I hold #1 and #2 in the organic listings. I want ALL of the sales or at least as many as I can get. If I have #1 and #2 in the organic, adwords gets me additional exposure. It also allows me to make an entirely different offer in the adwords - an offer that I could not get ranked in the organics.

IMO if you are interested in selling and putting pressure on your competitors you attack on all fronts. Daily budgets, removing adwords when you make the top ten organics are strategies for folks who are only interested in fractional success.