Investing In Paid Search Or Search Engine Optimization

By admin October 1, 2014

Advertisers and marketers make decisions based on their marketing strategies and who they want to target and which potential customers they want to reach. For some advertisers, an expensive 30-second Super Bowl commercial which can cost up to $4 million makes sense because they have reached a massive audience.

For online advertisers and digital marketing professionals, the choice is often between Pay Per Click or Paid Search (PPC) marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you are looking for a Search Engine Optimization company or a PPC company, you need to understand the pros and cons of both. While PPC campaigns are a form of paid advertising, SEO is free. Both of these digital strategies aim to give higher visibility to a website in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

The cost of a PPC campaign depends on what keywords you want to target. If you are hoping to get high visibility for a keyword in high demand — such as “diamond engagement rings online” or “online dating” or “auto insurance online” — then the cost per click can be very high. It’s all algorithm-driven now a days with Real Time Bidding (RTB) options where you can bid for ad placement in a real-time and automated fashion; all you have to do is set an upper band of how much you are willing to pay for your ad to get placed on a web page.

Benefits of Professional SEO Services

Unless you are a multinational corporation with deep pockets who can afford to spend thousands of dollars per month on a PPC campaign, it makes sense to work with a Search Engine Optimization company. They will ensure that your website is properly optimized for Google and other search engines to give it a good ranking in their SERP.

Cost Benefits

Clearly, compared to the cost you have to incur for every click which is the basis of a PPC campaign, an SEO approach is preferable as it’s free as long as you can get your site to rank high. Once you get a good placement in the organic search results, you will get traffic to your website without incurring any cost.

Traffic Benefits

Once you get your website onto the first page of the SERP or in the top five results, you can be assured of continuous traffic, particularly if your website manages to rank well for a popular keyword. This is the benefit of SEO. Whereas, with PPC campaigns, you will only get traffic to your website as long as you are willing to spend money on your campaign. More traffic via PPC also means more cost for you. However, the good thing about PPC is that the results and affects are immediate. When you are working with your Search Engine Optimization company, they can tell you the pros and cons of both in details as well.

Long-Term Benefits

Most importantly, SEO has enduring benefits that will last well beyond the duration of the SEO effort. Once your website acquires a good reputation and manages to rank well, you can just keep up the good work and not resort to any unethical SEO practices. This will lead to a virtuous cycle which will give you good placement on Google and which will lead to a lot of clicks and if users are satisfied with your website, then that will lead to more clicks which will tell search engines like Google to continue to give your website a good ranking in the organic search results. PPC campaigns, on the other hand, do not have similar long-term benefits. An experienced Search Engine Optimization company can advise you on what you need to do to your site to help it rank higher.

Additional Benefits of SEO

If a site does not have the desirable SEO characteristics, it will even do badly in a PPC campaign as Google takes into account a lot of factors including a site’s quality before it decides which PPC ads get displayed.

As is well-known, we are moving into a “mobile first” world as CEO Satya Nadella put it recently in his email to Microsoft employees. This is where a majority of Internet surfers are using their smartphones to conduct their searches. So, when they are looking for a business location, they are probably going to use that business establishment — whether a pizza place or a salon.

It makes sense therefore to optimize business websites for mobile searches where the website has click-to-call features and business timings and other details listed on their websites. A Google+ listing for the business will help with optimizing the website for Google Hummingbird updates which tweaked Google search results for natural language queries and voice searches (which primarily happen from mobile devices). These are all things that a Search Engine Optimization company can guide you on.

Conclusion

So, whether you are looking to build your business brand for the long-term or want a business website that is ready for an online environment where users and customers are all on Social Media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest — an SEO approach is the right way to go. PPC marketing is also another good option if you are looking for quick results and have the budget to play with. Both of these things can be handled by the Search Engine Optimization company you are working with.

For the best results, go for a professional SEO company who have the track record and the SEO professionals with the requisite industry experience who will be able to get the job done for you. If you are looking for a reputable and experience Search Engine Optimization company to help you with SEO or PPC marketing, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.