If you still think that having a website alone is enough, you probably miss the boat being found on the top of the search engines and directories. What is the purpose to be ranked at very low position in a search engine?Try to key-in a key phrase to find you own website, can you find it in the first page results of search engines? Probably not! Hence, that’s no problem at least you know now why you need SEO for your website!
"Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in vain."
Finding and designing a website is all about targeted key phrases!
SEO is much cost effective then any other marketing tool, off-line or online!
Search engine optimization may be just one part of an online internet marketing strategy, but it is the fundamental part.
It’s the baseline.
If you are doing nothing else, search engine placement and keyword related advertising can make up 80 to 90 percent of your traffic.
Search Engine Optimization will help you:
Explode you sales
Dominate your competition
Calculate fast ROI
Minimize your risk
Get superior sales results
Best investment for growth
SEO Merits
SEO has incredible ROI. Mostly pay per work - thus per thousand conversion cost per unit sold is less. PPC this goes up and up.
SEO is ongoing designing. Ranked performance is a measurement in itself of how good the site is (as a whole).
SEO is highly adaptive to market diversity (e.g. a single user that conducts a deep search finds you, identifying new opportunities to expand. (With PPC you’re stuck with your own knowledge of markets, and/or the engine’s ability to distinguish commonality). Five words on the page can match perfectly to a query not ever considered.
SEO is developing authority status - which is directly associated with brand. Many believe branding is reserved for Microsoft or IBM but brand equates to quality - thus no brand potential you have no quality recognition.
SEO in the long-term in more cost effective - as time passes cost reduces. With PPC cost only go up not down.
SEO is more adaptive to search engine changes (medium changes). An algo tweak - can be quickly observed and countered.
SEO provides growth and theme - back to design - to rank high a site must be developed with the market in mind with lots of informative content which develops links, which develop enhanced performance which develops more links, and so on.
SEO puts the web site owner in the driver’s seat - PPC puts the search engine (ad network) in the driver seat.
SEO has a better chance of delivering return customers. You must really think about what the market wants. With PPC it’s more what the company wants.
SEO Demerits
SEO normally has a relative long time to market (can not be achieved in a day, a week and sometimes months).
SEO is a process of adjustments (tweaking) and more dependent on competitive landscape.
SEO normally requires a knowledgeable third party who may or not be what they appear (e.g. not very good).
SEO can be a disastrous overnight (penalties, bans) which really sucks since the time to market was long.
SEO can be very expensive upfront.
SEO has a long learning curve and with many abrupt changes where the site’s owner can drop quickly from page 1 to page 100.
SEO effects are not immediately seen thus something completed 3 months ago can be mistaken for changes made last week.
Pay Per Click
Pay per click or PPC is a service in which an advertiser selects specific keywords or phrases and then creates a listing that will show up when someone searches for that phrase.
The advertiser selects an amount they are willing to pay for each click on their listing that results in a visit to their site – thus the term “pay per click”. If other advertisers have selected the same keyword or phrase as yours, you then compete against them for the highest position. Whoever is willing to spend the most shows up first with the others following in order.
What makes PPC attractive is that paid listings are distributed (syndicated) to other partner sites. In fact, if you bid for one of the top three positions at Overture (as an example), your listings will also show up at some of the leading search engines including Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, HotBot, Infospace, iWon, Lycos, and others. Therefore if you bid for top placement at Overture, you will show up at these partner sites as well.
What PPC has allowed you to do is instantly “pay” your way to the top whereas traditional SEO takes time and effort.
PPC Merits
PPC is easy.
PPC is direct market access - limited competition for eyeballs.
PPC is exceptional for short term specials, holiday promotion etc.
PPC has no middleman to rely on for performance.
PPC highly adaptive to market trends (e.g. last week "widget" was hot - this week "widgets" is cool)
PPC is near-real time no monthly waiting to produce results
PPC is highly cost effective (e.g. can produce 3000% return on investment)
PPC is highly effective in controlling market saturation (e.g. - out of inventory - immediate ads drop). Powering down your web site in other model can have long lasting negative effects. Noting that telling already paid customers they need to wait 3 week is very bad.
PPC Demerits
Paying for the entry when you don’t have the necessary products for the buyer (e.g. using "software" when the only software you have is a Windows 3.1) and few qualified visitors
Using informative phrases that offer significant clicks but possibly 95% of click are "free information seeking" only and never buy.
Quick loss of placement in favor of someone else willing to pay more than your budget allows.
Stuck with the model - when the search engine adapts to a new scheme you "must" meet/match their Terms of Service and/or changes.
If PPC is the only service used - you will never be an authority web site on anything - and authority defines - market trust, and your credibility.
PPC never allows the web site owner to truly fault find problem areas of the web site.
PPC favors big business with large marketing budgets.
And lots and lots of mis-information available that can have a site owner going in the wrong direction - where recover is near impossible (have a new client that did this - then abrupt changes directions, and now the site makes no sense).
PPC or SEO?
Actually, that depends. If you need to improve the quality and quantity of your lead flow as soon as possible then PPC is the right answer. If you want to insure that you have the highest ROI, enhance your branding and get an optimized conversion rate then SEO makes a lot of sense. For most companies it will be a combination of the two. SEO and PPC are complementary. In fact, a PPC program can help identify the most successful search terms, copy and call-to action and can then be used to optimize the site. PPC budgets can be adjusted up (and down) based on results, including the improvements delivered through SEO. The bottom-line is that you should spend your marketing dollars on the venues that deliver positive ROI. A campaign that includes both PPC and SEO helps you to saturate search result pages with your listings. As long as both remain profitable (which is easily traceable), both should remain a priority.
The Bottom Line
Search engine marketing, Whether through SEO or PPC or both, should be a fundamental component of your overall marketing mix. Search engine users have chosen to use the Internet to research an issue or solve a problem. They are the ultimate in qualified prospects. These visitors are well along the sales cycle as a result of having taken the initiative to use a search engine to solve their problem. These are buyers.
After spending tens of thousands of dollars or more developing a website, businesses often discover that the site is invisible to the major search providers. Fail to take your website’s visibility into consideration when making development decisions is expensive mistake, both in real dollars and opportunity costs. By recognizing both the importance and the need of search engine marketing in the development of your website, you hold a significant advantage.
Only one of two outcomes is possible each time a prospect performs a search:
They will find your website.
They will find a competitor’s website.
No comments:
Post a Comment