When is PPC a Better Strategy Than SEO?
The main objective of marketing and advertising is to make your product or services available to the maximum number of potential customers. Because of the impact of the electronic media, Internet search seems to be having a greater impact on the buying public than print media. The result has been that marketing and advertising rules and strategies have undergone a major revamp. This is why pay per click search engine advertising has literally exploded overnight.
It has never been easier to find and show your products and services to the maximum number of people who can be your potential customers. They’re all online, in one place — their favorite search engine, looking to buy your product or service. There is a huge potential customer market on the internet waiting to be tapped. Let’s face it. The easiest way to find a product in the 21st Century is to use the search engine of your choice.
It’s true that if a customer can’t find what they’re looking for in the first screen of the results following a search, they will probably scroll down and may even look as far as the second page. It’s not a good idea, to expect that being anywhere but in that first screen of the results, will bring you the business you need. So an effective marketing and advertising technique is one which allows your website and links to be on the initial pages so as to catch the eye of the consumer.
Here let us look at two paths for this destination. One is called Pay Per Click or PPC and the other is called Search Engine Optimization; or SEO. As the name suggests, PPC works on a model wherein a service provider pays to the search engine in order to get preference of display on the search page. The money is paid per click and not in lump sum say for a particular period of time. SEO on the other hand focuses on increasing the traffic on website through the search engine by only natural algorithm results. It involves proper coding, presentation, use of proper keywords in order to attain a higher rank in the search display page. It does not involve any advertising cost to be paid to the search engine.
Pay Per Click has some inherent advantages over Search Engine Optimization, and vice versa. However, there are no clear cut first and second positions, the fact of the matter is that for some organizations PPC might yield better outputs as compared to SEO. Some of the advantages of PPC are enlisted below;
* By its very nature pay per click offers more flexibility. You can start a campaign immediately. You can set daily,weekly or monthly budgets. You can even set cost per action goals. You can pick the exact keywords you think will deliver the highest sales conversion.
* Whether you’re researching a new business idea, or you’re just new to online marketing pay per click gets you results fast. These campaigns allow to to see quickly which keywords generate the best traffic. As you find out which keywords work you can increase your ad buy thereby growing your business even faster.
* PPC is tailor made for special offers and timely promotions. Because of the speed you can get a campaign up and running in you can take advantage when the selling time is limited. Need to test your advertising fast? PPC is the only way to go.
* You don’t have to design your entire website around PPC. You can build your website strictly with your customer in mind. You’re free to create a website that produces orders. PPC allows you the luxury of spending your time testing what is actually working rather than experimenting with algorithms.
* PPC lets you fail fast. If your ads don’t get clicked on it cost you nothing. It’s easy to gauge customer demand without a huge expenditure of money and time.
So whether to use PPC or SEO is totally a subjective choice depending on many constraints and parameters. Basically it is trade off in which the producer has to decide his optimum level.
Filed under: PPC Advertising