PPC Advertising vs. SEO

[nick8609]

There are two ways to get traffic to any site.  You can either get traffic to your website for free, such as SEO or you can use paid advertising; PPC (pay-per-click).

Often, there is a debate and constant warring between which strategy will be the best strategy to implement in exposing your site to the masses.

In actuality, Internet Marketing is a numbers game, and so the more targeted traffic you can get to your website, the more you will convert, and the more money you’ll make.

So which strategy is the best, free or paid?

Search Engine Optimization:

Free marketing strategies; such as SEO, are just as good as paid marketing, if not better.  For example, when the majority of people go searching for information online, they go to Google or any other search engine and type in a phrase; such as “How to Cook and Clean”.  The results they get back are divided into two parts, and that is Organic and Paid advertising.  These differences are usually easy to identify.  The organic results are listed on the left hand side and are listed 1-10 through a series of pages, while the paid are listed on the far right hand side. 

When doing a search people will often decide which way is best to resolve their dilemma or situation, and most often people tend to use the free results.  Thus, this is enough to indicate that if you want to get highly targeted and free traffic to your website it would be a good idea to get into the Organic results.  However, many things are involved, including getting backlinks to your site, making sure you have the right keyword density, and optimizing your site.  The downside to Search Engine Optimization is that in order to get your website ranked high, it can be very time consuming.  This is a reason why many marketers choose to skip SEO and use Pay-Per-Click with Google Adwords, Bing, or Yahoo Overture.


PAY PER CLICK (PPC):

In short, Pay-Per-Click is when you tell Google; or any other company, how much you want to be charged every time your advertisement is clicked.  The higher the amount that you set to be charged will often determine how high your website will rank in the search engines. On the other hand, if you set a low amount then your PPC may not give you good results.

The “pros” of PPC marketing is that it takes a small amount of time to get up and running, but the “con” is that you can not just set up a campaign and expect to make tons of money.  PPC is a science and should be implemented with strategy, therefore doing the homework is crucial because if you don’t choose the right keywords and/or charges you could end up losing tons of money and FAST. So PPC takes skill, learning, and possibly experience to succeed.

In short, SEO is a great way for beginners to get a site ranked high in organic results. SEO may be frustrating but once you succeed with SEO the benefits are great.  This is also true with PPC, but there is much more risk involved since your success is dependent on your money and skill.  Overall, it’s necessary to research both SEO and PPC as much as possible before leaning upon either.

[Grifter]

A very simplified way of looking at it an no doubt there is a reason for that.

PPC
First of all, anyone who thinks of PPC as text ads competing in search engines such as google will get their fingers burnt. It's highly competitive and expensive. The traditional route is for people to bid on keyword phrases that match the goods they have for sale. This will hurt.

As I mentioned before somewhere, it is much easier and costs less to bid on 'breaking news' items. Just match your audience to your required shoppers and you can get some success.

However, the most beneficial and successful PPC advertising is by images on the content network. With well designed ads a greater click through rate and lower cost per click is easily achieved. The vast majority of adveritsers do text ads. Image ads on content network are easy. I do it for affilliate stuff. If you can earn from that then sure enough you can earn from selling your own stuff.

News along with images......... now we're talking probably said too much

[conran]

As I mentioned before somewhere, it is much easier and costs less to bid on 'breaking news' items. Just match your audience to your required shoppers and you can get some success.

I'm at a complete loss here. What do you mean by bidding on 'breaking news' items?

And on PPC in general, I have followed the wise words of supposed guru's with AdWords and I get ZERO sales through it. I truly believe that 90% of it is nothing but click fraud by competitors and akin to throwing your cash in a big black hole.
My advice: don't bother with PPC advertising through either Google or Bing. Your competitors will be there too and they'll gladly spend all day clicking your ads and destroying your advertising budget.

Maybe that's why image ads on a content network are better; they're harder for your competitors to find!

[Grifter]

Before I used Reuters as an example of seeing news before the general media report it. So it may be a movie release. It may be a new product release, etc. Since it's new and will be reported in the newspapers the next day it's a short term way of getting traffic with low competitors.

I think the last time the example was when Dear John movie hit no1 over here. I saw it in reuters and stuck a little ad up just on 'dear john movie' keyword (exact). I only left it on for 8 hours and took it down before the newspapers went out but it got 600 impressions and I only bid a couple of pence. There was just one other competitor.


In your case you do adult stuff. So for you the best place for advertising I would think would be Plenty of Fish site. It is now getting a little saturated though.

[gordym75]

I think the last time the example was when Dear John movie hit no1 over here. I saw it in reuters and stuck a little ad up just on 'dear john movie' keyword (exact). I only left it on for 8 hours and took it down before the newspapers went out but it got 600 impressions and I only bid a couple of pence. There was just one other competitor.

That sounds like a good idea Grifter but could you clarify for me how you get targetted traffic from this? If I saw an ad for Dear John Movie and clicked on it expecting to be taken to a site with info about the movie but instead ended up on an unrelated site I'd hit the back button pretty quickly.

I may be missing your point here but I get the theory of using breaking news but cant see how it would be targetted traffic.

[Grifter]

I posted it on another thread somewhere.

It's about demographics. The movie is a romantic type. So you could put up a landing page offering what you think these people are looking for. Whilst they are there you then offer them your goods/services. Or try and get them to do some other CPA for example, they may want to watch the actual movie. So to verify they are human they fill in a short survey and you provide a link to the movie. You earn from the survey then.

Or lets say the next new non intrusive botox type treatment thing has been developed and is going to hit the news. You could make a landing page for this future product. If it hits the news and gets lots of hits then some review/info and a suggestion that you will be supplying as soon as it's out will get many to join an opt in list. Thats a very targetted list you'll have that you can sell lots of other products to.

This can also work with choosing the right Press Release Sites. You can achieve high ranking in google news if you're quick and get lots of free hits. Well you have to use a paid for service for the PR for immediate releases but there's ways around that too. Some really well syndicated sites will pay you if you give them backlinks and/or reviews. If they pay you £2 for every backlink then away and build them some links and use the money in your account for the top features.

I suppose it's just means and ways of doing things. I'm currently setting up youtube marketing. There's a specific message in the video along with a clickable link to a landing page. Then it's about trying to convert. But again if it's relevant and new then the actual video can get into google rankings.

[gordym75]

Excellent info Grifter. It makes sense to me now. Have some well deserved karma for that.

[Rainee Bows]

Karma from me too ..... i like a little "out of the box" thinking

Rain
xxxx

[mahesh adodis]

First of all, anyone who thinks of PPC will definetly be worried of his/her money going to spend on keywords. It's highly competitive and expensive.  people will more likely go-a-head with seo which is free of cost,But it takes a long time,this is organic and permanent,where as ppc brings instant traffic to the site,but not for the long time..

[Click SSL]

Both SEO and PPC are part of SEM, that is Search Engine Marketing.
SEO is the organic, natural way to make web pages more search engine friendly and achieve good ranking in result pages. The best thing about it is the fact that it is free (in case you are doing it yourself and not paying for it).
PPC is the best way to advertise online, in case you have a sum of money to invest, of course. You pay only for clicks on your keyword listings (the higher you bid, the higher your site appears in the search results). It is a good technique to boost up your traffic. Despite the fact that it will bring benefits for only a short time, it is definitely worth it.