SEO or PPC?
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The two main components of search engine marketing are search engine optimization and pay per click management. The two are very contrasting in terms of their benefits, their costs and how you go about using them for your website. It’s important to understand how both of these components of search engine marketing wok and how you can use them to help your business’s online presence and profitability.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO entails everything you do both on your website and off your website to boost its standings in the displayed results of the search engines. There are many different pieces of effective search engine optimization. For example, you can include targeted keywords and phrases into your content, you can build the amount of incoming links you have on your website and much more.
Results you see from SEO are known as organic. A visitor to your website that arrives there from a normal query in the search engine is known as an organic visitor. You didn’t have to pay to drive that person to your website, instead it was a result of your natural placement in the search engines.
SEO takes time to become effective and is generally a gradual process. You can’t throw up some keywords on your website and expect to be number 1 in Google the next week. Instead, SEO is about boosting the value and credibility of your website over the long haul. With the right strategy deployed continually for a long period of time you will be able to see and maintain substantial results in your search engine positioning. The result, of course, is increased traffic flow to your website and a greater online presence.
Pay Per Click
PPC campaigns entail purchasing sponsored listings that appear in the search engine results. When you make a search in Google, the sponsored results show up right at the top of the page, as well as down the sidebar of the page. Every link you see in these areas has been purchased.
The main thing to remember however is that you don’t really pay for the placement, you pay each time somebody clicks on your ad to go to your website. This offers a direct link between visitors and the amount you pay, and you can control your daily budget to limit how much you end up spending. The way that the listings are determined is through an ongoing bidding process. The more you are willing to spend per click, or per visitor, the higher you will end up getting ranked.
The great benefit of PPC is that it is instantaneous. You may not be able to run a masterful PPC campaign right away, but as soon as you create and launch a campaign, you will start seeing results. Therefore it’s an extremely powerful way to make an immediate impact on your traffic.
As opposed to SEO however PPC of course costs you money. If you don’t target your market appropriately and bid on keywords strategically, you can end up wasting a good deal of money. Another important aspect of PPC management is developing effective landing pages that convert visitors who click on your links. This is extremely important when every visitor you receive has been paid for.
Clearly there are many differences between search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns. SEO produces long term results and doesn’t cost you money directly. PPC can produce instant results but will cost you every time someone ends up on your website.
An effective search engine marketing strategy will usually incorporate pieces of both. It’s all about fitting a specific plan into a budget you can afford, and deploying tactics that help you achieve your specific goals. For example, if you just created a website and want to begin seeing traffic right away, bidding highly on some of your important key phrases will help you gain an immediate presence.
However, to keep costs down in the long run while further developing your presence, you will have to use SEO to help climb up the rankings. PPC is also commonly used when you are directly trying to sell a product or service to someone, as opposed to convert them over longer periods of time.
Be sure to consider both PPC and SEO when developing your Internet marketing strategy. Both can pay huge dividends for your website, but as mentioned they are extremely different from one another. Used in conjunction, they can be an extremely powerful tag team of Internet marketing.
