Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be described as a set of internet marketing tactics that is employed to improve the popularity and page ranking of websites. In layman’s terms, SEO improves the visibility of a website by increasing its traffic and page ranking. Search engines like Google use ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ search results to show websites on top. In general, SEO includes several techniques like paid search advertising, directory submission, paid inclusion, and paid inclusion. However, paid advertising is the most commonly used strategy.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is one such online marketing strategy, which is a means of driving targeted traffic to websites. Generally, SEO includes several strategies to generate targeted traffic like publishing quality content, creating inbound links, writing blogs, and article submissions. Moreover, paid search advertising is a popular way of increasing traffic on the internet.
It is a well-known fact that the more people who click on the advertisements on search engines like Google, the more money advertisers make. It is because visitors spend less time looking for information on websites and more time searching for information on paid search engines like Google. Hence, it is imperative for website owners to increase website traffic by employing paid search engine optimization.
There are several benefits of paid search engine optimization.
One of the most important benefits is that it increases the website ranking in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. As a result, the website gets more visits and page views. Also, it allows users to direct their queries through relevant keywords and it also displays the top ranking websites. More importantly, organic search results result lower a website’s ranking.
However, there are many drawbacks of PPC marketing strategy. One of the most important drawback is the cost involved. In short, a website owner has to pay to get his or her site listed on the top results of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The cost of optimization depends on various factors such as the keywords used for the marketing campaign, bid amount, number of clicks, and the level of competition. Hence, a person needs to be extremely knowledgeable about how to choose the right keywords so that he or she can have a successful PPC marketing strategy.
Another drawback of PPC marketing is that it has a very short shelf-life.
Once a company implements this form of search engine optimization, it requires constant maintenance in order to maintain its ranking and increase traffic. Since there is no direct relationship between the number of clicks and the ranking of a website, companies usually pay for clicks that lead to the generation of revenue rather than for page views. As a result, these campaigns prove to be more expensive than non-reciprocal reciprocal linking campaigns.
Lastly, PPC marketing can sometimes lead to false conclusions because a company can easily fool search engine optimization experts by paying for clicks that actually do not result in any revenue. This is because the real revenue generating sites are usually paying for ads and they do not let their links decay. In fact, there are even instances where the search engine optimization experts themselves write the pay-per-click ads to fool their competitors.
If you want to make the most of your online marketing plan, you need to know how to analyze the PPC results of your competitors. In order to achieve this, you can hire the services of PPC marketers who can tell you in detail about what keywords are being used by their customers and which ones are not performing well.
- This will allow you to incorporate the right keywords for your own marketing strategy so that you can achieve better ranking.
- On the other hand, if you think that your organic search results are far ahead of your competitors, you should follow them and give them some time to catch up with the organic results.
- You would not want to lose your share of profit just because you took too long to catch up.