In 2008, $12 billion was spent on PayPerClick advertising compared to $1.4 billion spent on SEO. People still don’t understand SEO. Adwords, on the other hand, is very easy to understand. If someone clicks a banner to visit your site, you have to pay a fee but you know that someone has seen your message. You know what you get and you know what you pay for. It’s like paying the guy who mows your lawn. It is very easy to see the work he did. He spends 2 hours, you can see the guy working through your kitchen window, and you pay him for the work afterwards for doing a good job.

SEO is very different. It's more like hiring an electrician to fix a problem. You know something isn't working right, you can't figure out what, and you have to take their word that everything is wired correctly. An SEO expert can help you optimize your site for Google and just like an electrician, you hand him a pile of money and he will do "something" with your site. He disappears and returns saying everything is fixed. He’s added some “inlinks”, changed some “on page keywords” and updates your “meta tags.” He tells you that everything is fixed and you’ll get great results from organic Google searches. Outwardly, you can’t tell anything has changed.

This is the problem of the SEO expert. It's difficult to explain what needs to be done in a simple manner without sounding like you’re speaking a foreign language, and it can take a lot of time to do SEO correctly, which means it often costs more. After they have finished optimizing a site, the results aren’t instantaneous. They can’t prove that their work had any effect on Google in an immediate fashion, so people prefer using Adwords. SEO isn’t a one time fix. It’s a long process of sitting and waiting. Over the course of three to six months, you’ll see the return on your investment with a stronger return on organic research for your entire site (not just one page) and more traffic to your website.

Done correctly, SEO can have a huge impact on your website and on your entire business. For example, by taking just one relevant keyword on a website and optimizing the site for it, it’s possible to advance from the 19th search result on Google to first or second place. For a keyword with 10,000 monthly searches, it means you will get about 2,000 visitors instead of 10.

Roughly 89% of search engine marketing is spent on PayPerClick advertising. In 2008, $11.9 billion was spent on PPC ads compared to $1.4 billion that was spent on Search Engine Optimization. When you look at the reach that PPC has compared to SEO, the results are the complete opposite; 90% of the people that do a search click on a link compared to only 10% that click on the paid ad. 

Considering 90% of Google users find websites through the organic search, proper SEO makes it possible for them to find your site over and over again long after the Adwords campaign has ended and brings in the people that don’t trust paid search results. So why are we spending 90% of our online marketing budgets to attract the 10% of online traffic generated by search engines?

Why settle for just a small piece of the pie when you can have 100% of it using Google's organic search? Start focusing more on SEO, either by hiring someone to help you out or by learning about it yourself.