Pay Per Click or Search Engine Optimization
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.
To show your product to maximum number of people, you need to know where you will find this large number of people who can be your potential customers. There is a huge potential customer market on the internet waiting to be tapped. Logically many service providers are exploiting different channels, by hook or by crook to catch the attention of these consumers on the internet. Search engines are the most common places where any person in quest for a product or a service is headed.
Again, by sheer logic and past self experiences we know that mostly the customers scan only one or at a maximum of two pages of search results of a search engine. He will visit websites and links on these two pages in which he finds keywords closest to what he is looking for. Thereby it brings business to these websites. So an effective marketing and advertising technique is one which allows your website and links to be on these initial pages so as to catch the eye of the person.
You can get good position in the search results using both SEO and pay per click. Smart marketers will use a combination of both. Pay per click (sponsored search) means an advertiser pays a search engine a pre-arranged bid amount every time a searcher clicks on his link and visits his website. The advertiser’s bid amount in relation to competitive bids determines how high his link will be in the search results. SEO is a bit more subtle. Rather than pay the search engine per click SEO focuses on proper coding, inbound links, and the use of proper keywords in order to attain a higher rank in the search display page.
Depending on your perspective you may feel that PPC or SEO has inherent advantages over the other, and you’d be right. Many businesses thrive using pay per click advertising. Other businesses swear by SEO. Some advantages of PPC are:
* Pay per click gives you more options. You have complete control pf your advertising. You can determine the exact time of day your ads show. You can determine in what location they show. You decide what keyword search results show your ads. Never before in history could you design your advertising to be so effective so fast.
* 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 allows you to time your advertising to seasonal promotions. You can start it on a dime and end the promotion the same way. If a customer is spending his resources to search you out over the holidays or any special occasion your PPC campaign makes sure your website is easily found. You can tailor the message for the season.
* 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.
It’s your choice. If you can achieve good positions with search engine optimization, my hats off to you, but while your waiting be sure to take advantage of the marketing feats you can accomplish with good PPC campaigns.
