A Review Of The Reasons For And Against Using Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization For Your Website Marketing

December 22, 2009 by toto

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

Firstly we will review the pay per click system, a way of making certain that you are visible to the people searching for your selected keywords by paying for a Search Engine Placement in the sponsored links portion of the search results page. This system has a number of positive attributes. The biggest is the speed at which results are produced. 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 advert your sales should follow not far behind.

Another great feature of the pay per click method is that if you do by chance get something wrong, say in the selection of your keywords, it is obvious very quickly. You can spot in a matter of days that although you are getting lots of clicks through to your website no one is buying anything. This will prompt you to re-asses your campaign before too much money has been chucked down the drain. It is possible with pay per click to limit your budget and therefore plan financially knowing that you will pay no more that the maximum you yourself have selected.

On the negative side it can still work out very expensive as enquiries (clicks) go up, so too does your bill, whereas the price of other forms of advertising stays constant no matter how many customers it provides. Also there is proven statistics that shows that organic Search Engine Placement listings receive 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 progress is made and then as the clients website gradually climbs to page 1 the sales start to increase steadily over a subsequent period. This is definitely no quick fix. Another issue with it, unlike pay per click, is that due to it’s speed, if you do get the keywords incorrect at the beginning you will have wasted a lot of effort before you actually notice the mistake. This is one of the reasons why getting some professional advice from a SEO Company may well be a cost effective idea.

On the positive side if you do have an ongoing sales organisation the effort and the wait is absolutely worth it. The charges from the search engine optimization company, after an initial fee are usually a small amount, say ?15 per week for every keyword that achieves 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 cheaper than pay per click.

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