A Review Of The Positives And Negatives Of Using Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization For Your Website Advertising

December 4, 2009 by toto

Looking at two of the methods of advertising your company using Online Marketing in terms of their positive and negative features may help you to decide which method to use for your own company.

Firstly we will consider the pay per click system, a way of ensuring that you are visible to the people searching for your selected keywords by paying for a Search Engine Placement in the sponsored links area of the search results page. This procedure has a number of positive attributes. The largest is the speed at which results are provided. To set up a campaign like this takes less than an hour and within seven days you will have some very constructive information about how it is going. Visitors to your site will rise immediately and as long as you are providing what the searcher understood that you were selling from your pay per click advertisement your sales should follow not far behind.

Another great aspect of the pay per click method is that if you do by chance get something wrong, say in the choice of your keywords, it is obvious very quickly. You can see in a matter of days that although you are getting a lot of clicks through to your website no one is purchasing anything. This will prompt you to reconsider your campaign before too much money has been thrown down the drain. It is possible with pay per click to quantify your budget and therefore plan financially knowing that you will spend no more that the maximum you yourself have chosen.

On the negative side it can still work out very pricey as enquiries (clicks) go up, so too does your bill, whereas the payment for other forms of advertising remains steady no matter how many customers it brings. Also there is proven information that shows that organic Search Engine Placement listings draw ten times the number of clicks that pay per click do, suggesting that a lot of searchers would prefer not to use them.

Now moving on to Search Engine Optimization we can see a much slower route. As it is organic or natural it tends to take a matter of weeks before any improvement is made and then as the clients website steadily climbs to page 1 the sales start to increase steadily over a subsequent period. This is definitely no quick fix. Another problem with it, unlike pay per click, is that because of it’s speed, if you do get the keywords wrong at the start you will have wasted a lot of effort before you actually spot the error. This is one of the reasons why getting some expert advice from a SEO Company may well be a cost effective way forward.

On the plus side if you do have an ongoing sales company the effort and the wait is definitely worth it. The charges from the search engine optimization company, after an upfront fee are usually a small amount, say ?15 per week for every keyword that reaches a search engine placement ranking on page 1. Bearing in mind the increased number of visitors to your site from the organic listing this works out far far better than pay per click.

So generally it seems that pay per click is brilliant for immediate business and for one off sales. Whereas Search engine optimization appears to lend itself to the online marketing of steady medium to long term business.