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I’ve been an advertising and marketing professional for over 30 years, well and truly before Al Gore invented the Internet. Like everybody else, we kept up with technology, and jumped on the Google bandwagon when it was little and red.

So yesterday, when yet another client brought up the idea of spending good money on increasing their adword buy, I had to say it. For a lot of businesses, buying adwords and investing lots of money in their SEO strategy makes about as much business sense as a stripper who would pay an audience to watch her show.

Well, maybe I can parse this using a more PC description.

Imagine yourself in a rock band, performing in front of 10,000 people all of whom have paid good money to see you perform. You bare your soul, do a great show, and take the money. Nice work if you can get it….

Now, imagine yourself in a business. Your business. You’ve just paid for a bunch of adwords, and a brand new SEO-friendly website. In fact, you’ve just paid so much that 10,000 total strangers come and see you open your company kimona. Reveal all about your products and services. But the truth is, unlike the rock band with a fan base of thousands, only about 10 members of the audience you are paying for actually want to see you. Nice work for somebody. The somebodys you just spent a whole bunch of money with to help you pull in an empty net. And the people who really want to see you? Well, they need to sit down and have a conversation with some engineers. And anyway, they were going to call you about setting up an appointment even before you spent all of this money on SEO.

In case after case when we actually get down in the weeds and follow the sales cycle, adwords and SEO very quickly become a non-issue. It simply doesn’t matter. In fact, for most products and services that are: a) specialized; b) expensive; and C) complex , SEO and adwords are totally irrelevant. What matters is that the finite audience that is your target is kept abreast of your enterprise, has easy access to the information they need for buying decisions, and knows where to find you.

This is not to say that parts of a business could not benefit from micro-marketing strategies using SEO and adwords. For example, a manufacturer of industrial machinery may offer an online parts store with spare parts at competitive pricing not only for their own products, but for competitor products as well. In this case, a judicious adword buy to increase spare parts traffic might make sense. But only after looking at all of the options.

All I’m saying is this. Think about your market targets and your sales cycle BEFORE you invest in either your SEO or your adword strategies. SEO and adword buys are not a mandatory component of every marketing initiative. You could save money, and sleep a whole lot easier.