We genuinely love our jobs. I know that's unusual as most people love to have a good ol' moan about work some times. It's one of those things that, almost without exception, you can relate to when you meet someone knew - everyone likes to moan about the 9-to-5 grind.

However, we do genuinely love our jobs. And not because we're swimming in money - just check our prices and you'll see that that is not the case(!) - but because we get to help people.

This week highlighted an all too common issue with people working in search engine optimisation and it gave us a chance to help someone out.

We took on a customer recently who has been given some poor advice in the past. Their web site was doing poorly in the search engine rankings due to a combination of poor web site design / management and bad SEO advice.

This was compounded by their previous SEO company taking themselves on and their largest competitors - a clear conflict of interest.

One thing led to another and over the course of a few years, they bounced around and eventually ended up in a very poor situation where they are now spending £3,000 a month(!) on Google Adwords, just to generate enough sales to keep the business going.

Now, there are clearly a few problems here. Adwords works on a per click basis, meaning that if someone sees your advert and click on it, Google take a fee from you. Depending on your market sector this can range dramatically from 25p to £25. The thing is, although a useful tool in some circumstances, Google will take that payment from you regardless of whether the person makes a purchase from your site or not. Therefore if Google charge you £5 per click, you could easily spend a lot of money very quickly and not be making much money from it.

Back to our story... The company that we took on were spending £3,000 a month on Adwords and nothing on SEO. The key issue was how to reduce overall spending whilst maintaining and increasing sales levels.

We convinced the company to proceed with spending some of their marketing budget on SEO. Why? Because SEO will bring longer term and cheaper results than Adwords.

Once a site is at the top of the Google search results, it often stays there for some time. Obviously this depends on your market and what your competitors are doing but once a good ranking has been established, it takes some time for the site to disappear again. So even if you stopped spending money on SEO, your site would still be found by your customers for some time. Adwords however, the second you stop paying them, your customers cannot find you.

Gradually we are reducing the amount of money that our customer spends on Google Adwords as the SEO work that we're doing is taking hold. Eventually we will reduce their Adword spending to zero, and just have a low on-going SEO budget to maintain the site's rankings across their full range of keywords.

Now all of this may make it sound as if Adwords are not a useful tool. They are in certain circumstances but they should not be your primary source of generating customer leads. It's far too expensive and short-term for that.

Confused? Need help with your Adword spending or SEO, just get in touch.