Benefits of PPC and SEO

When looking to promote your website with Internet marketing you may feel confused about whether Pay Per Cick (PPC) advertising or Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the right path to take to get visitors to your site and to maximise your sales conversions.

Both methods have certain benefits but you need to be clear on what benefits you can expect to receive from each aspect.

Pay Per Click

The clear advantages of PPC where you are essentially bidding for your position using certain keywords are as follows:

• Instant traffic to your website whilst your daily bidding budget lasts.
• Sales being generated quickly and easily
• You can test the effectiveness of your chosen keywords and see what conversions they bring to your website.
• It’s a quick and easy way to judge what keywords are more suitable for your website and industry to bring the conversions you want.
• You are in control of what cash limit per day you set to spend.
• PPC is easier for business owners to understand than SEO.

SEO

The impact that a long term SEO campaign will bring to your website and business are:

• Organic SEO is the natural way to get your site onto page 1 and once your site is there, as long as your SEO work is maintained then you will say on page 1 with permanent top level advertising.
• You receive as many visitors as possible at no additional cost to you.
• The natural search results are clicked more frequently by searchers than the AdWords listings so there is more potential visitors that will come to your listing.
• Ultimately for a campaign that requires long term success and that will be a continued means of advertising for a business then Organic SEO is certainly the way forward to ensure that you get a long term better return on your investment.
• SEO requires bringing each website’s architecture up to a certain standard and building good links across the Internet and ensuring the content within the site is optimised to a high standard.

Many people who want fast results and maybe don’t understand the full workings of SEO would opt to have just pay per click as the cost /result ratio is something they can see easily from the start yet with SEO patience and trust is needed for the interim whilst they wait for the continued SEO work to make the keywords perform.

However companies that use just PPC ultimately end up spending more money as it has no long term advantages the high cost to get clients will always continue and to get more visitors the cost on PPC will need to increase. You will also be charged per click even if it doesn’t turn to a conversion and once your daily budget is reached your advert won’t appear until the next day meaning you could potentially miss out on visitors who perhaps would have converted to a sale.

How to use both PPC and SEO together

A wise strategy for those wishing for the fast results of PPC but the long term benefits of SEO is to start by having an initial joint campaign of both.

A period of PPC with Google AdWords at the start of a campaign as a short term strategy could help you assess your keyword choice before you get too far into your link building for your organic SEO. This will not only ensure that your keyword choices get the right kind of visitors, but it is an excellent resource when you integrate your AdWords into your Google Analytics to see which of your keywords produce the highest level of conversions for your business. The statistics you can get filtered into your Google Analytics will enable you to make detailed comparisons on a number of variables which will assist your planning and strategies for your long term SEO enabling you to gain quick insight into which keywords will give your website the most success in terms of conversions.

Implementing an initial combination of PPC and SEO is even more beneficial to Internet marketing campaigns that have competitive national keywords that will take several months to perform on page 1.

When your organic SEO campaign is successfully working you can simply stop your PPC and maintain your strong established SEO campaign with the knowledge that the keywords that bring you the best conversions are at the head of your strategy.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they start out on their first SEO campaign is that they don’t work out exactly what it is they want to achieve from the campaign. Being page 1 on Google is all very well, but if you target the wrong keywords for your site you will actually damage your site in the ‘eyes’ of Google.

You must get to know your client. Make sure you are all ‘on the same page’ in terms of what they hope to achieve from the campaign. Ask them what outcome they hope to get from their SEO campaign. It may be increased sales, increased enquiries, signing up for a newsletter or simply brand reaffirming by placing them first for their company name.

If your client has an eCommerce site it is worthwhile asking them which products have the highest margin, as targeting these directly will make the client the best ROI (Return on Investment). This approach also works well for targeting service providers (e.g. plumbers, electricians etc) as there may be a particular service that brings in more money than other services. For example a new boiler installation for a plumber would be better than fixing leaking taps.

Another thing to consider is regional specific SEO, something that the team here at Creare are particularly expert in. I often ask my clients which area they want to target first, as there are often add-on costs involved for the client if they have to service areas further away. Alternatively, they may know that certain areas have more of their target audience in, and therefore are better to ‘go for’.

The next thing to make sure your client is well aware of is the timescales involved with SEO. SEO is a time consuming process, and the first three months are often fraught with dangers, the client can’t see results because the listing hasn’t yet reached its desired position, and you feel under pressure to get the site performing asap. This is not the time to dip into black hat techniques though! Make sure you are transparent with your client as to what can be achieved in the timescale they are willing to work with. It may be a case of working on ‘easier’ keywords that will get them an ROI first before tackling the ‘tougher’ keywords that take time.

Remember, SEO is all about marketing your client, albeit through a search engine rather than ‘traditional’ means. Therefore, you must make sure that you client makes money. This is your ultimate job. Page 1 listings are fantastic, of course they are, but money in the bank for your client is what really makes the difference.

Use all the tools at your disposal, Google Analytics for example can tell you a lot about which keywords perform well, whether the pages targeted for those keywords are effective and ultimately whether you are going for the right keywords. Watch out for Rebecca’s articles on Google Analytics, and how to get the best from this fabulous tool.

Once you have a good relationship with your client, and this takes time, you will be in a unique position to be able to advise them as to where their online marketing should go next. If you are anything like me, you will genuinely want to help make your client money! I get a massive buzz when my clients report increased sales or enquiries.

If I have done the initial work in ensuring I am targeting the best keywords for their business then I know I will be on the right track once the site starts to perform. This is the key to a successful SEO campaign.

Embracing this bold new world can pay dividends to your SEO campaign

While search engine spiders won’t pick up on optimisation within a video itself, they can identify a range of text-based content that is associated with it. With the continued rise of YouTube – 999,987,865 videos and counting – it is easy to see why the industry is starting to wake up to the SEO possibilities of web video.

While it may be most famous for being home to videos of dancing dogs and skateboarding cats, YouTube also hosts an array of videos that offer expert opinion and analysis on related topics. As seen with my colleagues James and Nick’s SEO video blogs, they can generate significant traffic and stimulate debate among the audience. And with a transcript of the video in text form present as well as backward links to the mother site will also enable excellent search engine optimisation possibilities.

It is important to note however there are alternatives to YouTube in the videosphere. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are still growing at an alarming rate, and also allow users to embed videos, alongside sites such as Twiddeo (Twitter’s sister site) and Vimeo. If the video is considered useful or has a certain X Factor it may even be shared between a web community for even wider exposure, which can spread like wild fire around the globe.

But remember to always add the video to your own site before uploading it elsewhere, to ensure your site gets the authority.

Linking provides another opportunity to maximise your SEO strategy from video content. Uploading to video sharing networks enables backward linking to your own website, which is particularly useful if the video you shoot is informative and entertaining - which will engage the audience and improve the likelihood of traffic being redirected.

Any HTML content surrounding a video, such as a transcript of the content for example, can represent one way of optimising. Even a word-for-word script can utilise extensive key phrasing. Ensure filenames, titles and video descriptions are key word rich, as well as always tagging videos with phrases incorporating these terms as well.

An XML or video sitemap on your own website will also generate activity within the search engines. Submitting the sitemap via Webmaster Tools will help the engines discover material they otherwise wouldn’t.

Don’t delay in harnessing the power of video in your SEO campaign. This bold new world offers a wealth of opportunities.

Script:

- Nick -

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, you often see articles and companies asking this simple question, what returns the better investment, organic search engine optimisation or pay per click advertisements?

- James -

It can be a difficult question to answer and we think that it is individual to each company trying to market on the internet, however we also think that a correctly organized organic campaign can be more effective in the long run in terms of cost.

- Nick -

When we first thought about answering this question, user behavior came to mind, so we found this eye tracking report from enquiro. This shows a very nice visual representation of where an average Google user looks once they have performed a search query.

- James -

You can see from the image that the user naturally looks towards the top left hand side of the results and in particular the first Pay Per Click result and top 2 organic listings. This suggests that if you want to gain the full benefit from your campaign then you need to be in the top 3 positions.

What this means is if you are going pay for your listings with Google Adwords then you really have to be the highest bidder in order to be the first listing.

- Nick -

With this in mind we thought we would use the information that the external keyword tool provides to estimate the cost of optimising for a couple of phrases, organic vs PPC.

You can see we have taken the average search volume for the phrases ‘air conditioning’ and ‘web design’, then the click through rate or CTR based on 3%. 3 -5 % is pretty average for CTR (Click through rate), but it can vary with each campaign. We have then multiplied the CTR with the CPC or cost per click to get a monthly cost.

So as you can see for ‘air conditioning’ it would cost on average £1200 per month to be in position 1-3 on Google Adwords, to be position one constantly it would it would undoubtedly cost most. Organically Creare would charge somewhere in the region of £500 per month for this phrase.

The other phrase we analyzed ‘web design’ would cost Creare over £5000 per month to be in position 1-3 on Google’s sponsored listings, so our organic listing provides us a much more profitable return on investment.

- James -

Of course you do have to remember that with Pay Per Click the results are instant, but with organic SEO there are a large amount of factors which contribute to a site performing in a search engine organically. What this means is that an organic campaign has a time scale attached to it. Going back to what we said at the start, organic will provide a better ROI, but you have to patient and expect to see a fluctuation in results until the domain reaches the required authority to list in the top 3 positions.

- Nick -

There is no reason of course that you cannot run Pay Per Click campaigns along side your organic strategy in order to reap the benefits of both. Thanks for watching if you have any question or comments please leave them on You tube or the supporting blog post.

Enquiro eye tracking report on Google

The majority of people are new to this whole computer/Internet thing, and for those of us that have spent our whole adult lives glued to a keyboard, it can be difficult to think what we did before the computer age.

So how did businesses survive without Internet, without Blackberry’s and without teams of people constantly flicking through search engines?

We all have the ability to prise our eyes away from a screen and read the paper, go to the local pub and just not think about SERPS for one night. And by doing this, you may just improve your SEO and the listings of your customers.

Regardless of what your contribution is in terms of SEO, whether its link building, copy writing or market research, taking a break and walking away from your computer for a while can make all the difference when you return back to your well moulded chair.

Of course, as with anything, your aims and goals should remain at the back of your mind. By thinking about a project, you mentally fog what you need to do. By relaxing your mind, ideas will spring out and you can see more clearly what your aiming to achieve and the best to doing it.

Communication is key and we can sometimes rely too heavily on our computer to take up our time. By spending quality time with friends, or merely surrounding yourself with people you will surprised about what you pick up that will help you with your own work.

The majority of Search Engine Optimisation involves the process of writing and marketing businesses to help them appear at the top of the Search Engines. Both areas are about communication and by spending time with real people, your techniques will improve three fold. By listening to others you can pick up various ways that people persuade, pitch, argue and advise, even if it’s simple about who buys the next beer!

So, next time you’re tearing your hair out trying to find something to write, build or design, my advice is to step away from your computer and take some time out, you will be surprised what your brain comes up with when it’s had time to relax.