I remember thinking back when I worked for a web design company on a contractor basis, must have been about two years ago at this stage I reckon, but anyhow if one of their clients was not happy with the results coming in from organic SEO then would use some of the per month maintence fee towards buying visitrs on the PPC side of things.

I wonder is (was) this perhaps a little short sighted in the sense that there was less money to committ to organic SEO in terms of man hours for tweaks, directory submissions, new content etc. So although visitors where coming in from PPC, the goal of organic SEO would have likely taken longer now overall.

In the general sense I suppose if a ecommerce site is new and has no traffic at all and there is a budget for it, it is prob a good idea to use PPC for the first 8,9,10 months or whatever before any natural rankings come through, rather than simply waiting for the sandbox to lift.

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I would imagine that the real problem with SEO Vs. SEM is that the results from SEM are far more tangible and immediate. Impatient bosses tend not to understand that SEO can take quite some time to return measurable results.

Bear in mind that SEM has been marketed very well (think of G and Y! pushing their wares) while SEO is marketed by far smaller outfits, not to mention all the sanke-oil salesmen offering to submit your site to 10 million directories every 4 weeks for $199.

I've been working on a post on this issue (you dont want to see how many draft posts I have at the mo).

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