Barry Hand

Last week, I was speak­ing at the sem­i­nar which cov­ered Search Engine Mar­ket­ing and Web Ana­lyt­ics, one of the mis­con­cep­tions that came up was that of the expla­na­tion of Organic v Paid Search.

It was black & whitely explained that web­sites listed organ­i­cally were opti­mised, while paid list­ings were lazy & unop­ti­mised!

Rather that the two meth­ods com­pet­ing with each other, I find they actu­ally com­pli­ment, and I’d always rec­om­mend a PPC cam­paign to assist SEO.

Here’s my  5 rea­sons to utilise PPC & SEO

1. Wider Reach — PPC allows you to tar­get searchers which may not be pos­si­ble to do with SEO, as it’s impos­si­ble to opti­mise for every search term in every country.
2. Con­ver­sion Opti­mi­sa­tion — PPC traf­fic allows you to con­trol the land­ing page for search phrases, this is extremely use­ful when analysing your con­ver­sion process, you can test a page which is only avail­able to your PPC vis­i­tors. Tools such as Googles Web­site Opti­miser or Crazy Egg are great in this sce­nario, this can then feed back into your main website.
3. Brand Pro­tec­tion — with the recent changes to the trade­mark pol­icy on Google Adwords, your com­peti­tors may be bid­ding on your trade­marks. As you own the brand, you will most likely have a max­i­mum qual­ity score, with a min­i­mum cost per click for those terms. It also allows you to cor­rectly use the ‘Offi­cial Site’ or Copy­right / Trade­mark sym­bols in the ad text, increase click through rate and lower costs.
4. Key­Word Research — Cur­rently the best key­word research tool for traf­fic in Ire­land is either using googles key­word sug­gester, or cre­at­ing an adwords cam­paign with exact/phrase match on a group of key­words and using reports to deter­mine the search pat­tern. The key­word place­ment report in Adwords should should addi­tional search terms that have trig­gered your ad. All this infor­ma­tion can be used to feed back into your SEO efforts, as well as lower your PPC costs by look­ing closer at the long tail searches.
5. Instant Results — PPC can be turned on/off within min­utes, and allows you to instantly get listed, while SEO results may take a long time, and even then may not get that cov­eted page 1 listing.

PPC adver­tis­ing obvi­ously isn’t for lazy web­sites, and in many cases is vital to cre­at­ing a great web mar­ket­ing strat­egy.