I'm playing devil's advocate here because I believe you should mix the two but is it because:

• There is a certainty with PPC that doesn’t exist with SEO

• SEO results are harder to measure – especially the ROI vs PPC

• You can’t turn off annual retainers as easily as PPC and right now that matters.

And SEO’s home is most definitely not in the IT department!

Hi Matthew, the certainty element resonates with me. I guess the frustration is the proportion of money ( in some cases ) blindly spent on PPC without even a consideration for the protection of existing seo traffic let alone the growth potential. I'd love to be able to turn off organic traffic to prove a point, in the meantime I will keep on with the excel modelling to demonstrate the benefits !

It seems to be common sense to develop your SEO alongside any PPC.

PPC is a quick win, easily manageable and results can be tracked. It is also a far more familiar channel to traditional marketeers in terms of its commonality with many offline channels (ie you pay your money - you get 'results').

SEO is seen as a ‘dark art’, more technical and does not have the traditional association - and thus 'suffers' as a result.  It also is vulnerable to algorithm changes

But the 2 are linked – for both you need to understand and analyse what people are searching for and optimise both sets of activity accordingly.

Ultimately you want to improve rankings for head / brand search terms whilst reducing your PPC spend by maximising the efficiency of your long tail PPC campaign.

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They are both intrinsically linked...I have managed to successfully propose a transfer of PPC spend to natural SEO spend to many clients, based on the inherent link.

This however is a transfer of some of the budget not all of it. The bonus here is that by truly optimising naturally you will hopefully reduce your Pay Per Click CPC anyway, so therefore you may even receive the same amount (or only a small decrease) in clicks from PPC, whilst improving in the natural SERPS.