tagged: internet advertising, ppc, search engines, seo

SEO & PPC

Posted by Kupr in ppc, seo

I often see forum posts asking whether to promote a site using SEO or PPC. What follows are usually a number of comments outlining the merits of each method.  For me, the answer is to use both as they should be used for slightly different purposes.  But before I go into that, I’ll explain what each method is, and their different pros and cons.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is the technique of improving a websites relevancy so that it appears higher in the search engine results for certain keywords. It is also referred to as Natural, or Organic Search.  In the following list are a couple of tactics that can help in achieving this:

• use the keyword you want to appear for in the title tags, heading tags and body copy.
• don’t use ‘read more’ etc for internal links, instead use name of the page you’re linking to.
• increase the number of external sites that link to yours by providing good quality, original and fresh content.

In essence, you can achieve most of this for free, unless you are paying a consultant or agency to do the work/make recommendations for you.  However, it can take a while to see the fruits of your labour.  Web pages are indexed by the search engines relatively frequently, but it can take weeks/months for you to see a difference in the position you appear in the listings.

PPC

Pay Per Click is the form of advertising where you pay for each time a user clicks on one of your adverts.  These adverts are placed on the search engine results page (SERP) and are often seen above, and to the right of the SEO results, normaly under a title such as Sponored Links.  The position of your ad is determined with an auction, where in general terms, the more you are prepared to pay per click, (known as bid), the higher you will appear.  There are other factors such as the relevency of the ad, and your website to the keyword that can also affect the position.

The advantage of PPC, is that you can have an ad up and running and driving traffic to your site within a few minutes.  You have great control over what text you put in your ad, which keywords to appear for, along with when and how often the ad should appear.  However, you may need to invest quite substantially in this advertising channel if you want to achieve real benefit, particularly if you operate in the Finance, or Gambling sectors, where the price per click at the top end can be around £25!!

So which to use?

If you have limited budget, then SEO should be your first port of call, as you can achieve good positing in the results with next to no money being spent.  If you can get SEO to drive sales and revenue for you, once you start to get viable reslults, you can then invest some of the profit into PPC.

If you have dedicated advertising budget for this, I would then strongly recommend that you use both channels.  What you need to remember is that you can get SEO and PPC to deliever slightly different users to your website.  As you are not paying for each click coming from SEO, it makes more sense to optimise this channel to those users who may be just looking for information on your business.  For example potential stock investors, students researching, media details etc.  PPC therefore should be focused on driving sales, and generating an exceptable return for your investment.

Some of the worlds largest companies are examples of this.  Run a search for Dell for example, and you can see the difference in the language between the two seperate results.

Also the imediacy of PPC means that you can react very quickly to something in your marketplace.  For instance if you were a hotel provided and you were to see in the morining papers that an airline was offering a promotional fare to certain cites, you could start to bid on keywords relating to those cities and create a relevant ad to take advantage of the increased traffic of people looking for accomodation.

I also often hear advertisers saying they are number 1 in the natural results for their brand terms, so why pay for PPC traffic?  Well, if you don’t bid on your own brand terms, you can be sure that some of your competitors will, and consequentely take some of your customers and business.  This is a very real and important point now that Google has relaxed it’s policy on competitors bidding on brand trademarks. There are also studies that indicate users are more likely to click on a brand that appears in both sets of results.

Ultimately, with most other things in internet marketing, you should test the various options and see what works best for your website and business to make sure that you can achieve a suitable return on investment.