Search Engine Marketing: SEO or PPC
Okay, you have a web site. Does anyone see it? Do visitors return? How do they find your site?
Search engines usually drive the majority of traffic to a web site. This means most online businesses and websites must address the issue of their site’s visibility on the search engines, so more visitors can find and browse their site. What Internet marketing strategy is the optimal for raising your site’s ranking?
There are three well known, basic choices of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to increase traffic directed from search engines. You can use Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or a combination of both.
Search Engine Optimization
Natural (also called organic) SEO is done by careful and consistent creation and editing of the site’s pages. It is an ongoing task. Keep pages free of typos and broken links. Content counts. Although there may be similar sites, be sure to have unique content. Search engines will penalize for plagiarism and regurgitated content from other sites. Be sure the search engine crawlers can easily find keywords appropriate to the site theme. The cleaner and more understandable a site is, the more the search engine spiders prefer that site to other similar sites.
Pay-Per-Click
Pay-per-click is just what it sounds like. You pay to have search engines send visitor traffic to your site. You choose keywords that match your web site content (product or service) and set bids for each. Your online ad displays when someone searches and the words used to search match your keywords. You pay for each click-through, sending a "purchased" visitor to your site.
How will you decide?
SEO or PPC, which should you use? The pros for implementing effective SEO are long term and raised ranking. The negative side of SEO is that it is a never-ending task. To remain effective, each time you add content or change your site, the SEO cycle must occur. With PPC, the results of increased site traffic can be immediate as long as you are willing to pay the bill. The size of investment is controllable and you also do not need to become an expert at raising your search engine ranking. On the PPC con side, if you stop or scale back on PPC ads and budget, the volume of search engine referred traffic will drop off. Additionally, the task of choosing/editing keywords, setting/changing bids and monitoring ad campaign results monthly can become a full time job.
Recommendation:
Crystal Coding Concepts agrees with many other Internet marketing experts. If your web site is a blog or forum, investing time in natural SEO may be sufficient. Raising your search engine ranking and appearing in the top search results is harder now that large corporations have joined the internet market place. So, if your web site is an ecommerce business offering products or services, we strongly recommend the use of both.
If you think you may want our SEM services, please feel free to contact us.
