Information Technology Blog:- When it comes to online marketing, subtlety is often the key for attracting repeat visitors, but you shouldn’t be so passive that no one finds your website. For many website and business owners, the subtle but effective marketing comes down to choosing between search engine optimization or pay per click. If you’re working with a limited budget or you only have so much time your staff can devote to designing the campaign, it makes sense to choose only one to start; however, you can work both into your marketing plan.
Opting for PPC
With pay per click, a link to your website, often along with a short description, appears across the Internet on other websites. To get the most out of the campaign, your marketing team needs to target websites that share the same intended audience as yours; for example, if you sell products to new mothers, your PPC ads should appear on blogs and other websites with news, information and stories for new parents. You can easily learn more about putting together an effective PPC advertising campaigns.
The advantages of PPC include:
- Personalized automation amounts. If you work with a PPC service and provide a budget, they can choose which affiliates display your links for you, but you’ll have the freedom to track results and adjust which sites on which you want to continue buying links.
- A set budget. When the money in your account runs out, the campaign stops until more is added; no money is wasted and the budget never gets out of control.
- Guaranteed results. You don’t pay until a website visitor clicks the link, so whether you go through your budget in a day or a month, you’re guaranteed results for any money you spend.
PPC is also a fast campaign to launch and requires little prep work on your part. Simply decide what you want your link to say and how much you’re willing to spend per month.
The Advantages of SEO
SEO takes more work on your part but can cost little to nothing, unless you outsource the task to professionals. However, outsourcing takes far less of your time and may be more effective in the long run. Still, SEO has the potential to provide more results than PPC, or at least more long-term results. When you optimize content for search engines, you provide quality, engaging content that’s well-researched and unduplicated on the web. Don’t worry too much about keywords; keywords used to be a factor in SEO, but now repeating keywords too often could actually get your content flagged and appear lower in search results. Instead, focus on providing content your intended audience will want to read.
You can also share your content on industry-related websites that see more traffic for additional exposure, but with SEO, the bulk of your content will appear on your own website. The goal of SEO is to make your website appear toward the top of search engine results without having to pay the search engine for the privilege. Typical search engine users know to filter out sponsored results and instead look for relevant content.
Using Both SEO and PPC
Because the goal of both SEO and PPC is to drive more traffic to your website and the two methods are so different, there’s generally room for both in most marketing campaigns. Devote the bulk of your budget to PPC and try producing SEO-oriented content yourself, or cap the PPC budget to spend more money on hiring SEO marketing professionals. PPC requires so little prep work, you can use the time left for SEO; if you don’t really have time for either, you can outsource SEO for better results.
Both SEO and PPC can be more effective depending on the medium. Forbes reports people are 68 percent more likely to follow through a click and remember it coming from a social media website than on another medium online, for example. A successful marketing campaign doesn’t rely on just one form of advertising or one medium, but you might find more success by focusing heavily on one form over the other. Give both SEO and PPC a trial run, and see which campaign produces better results.
