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By Patrick Gavin, Inc.
When you pay a search engine for each visitor they send to your
site, this is called pay per click (PPC). Pay per click listings
are usually marked as advertisements or “Sponsored Links”
and appear above or beside the search engine’s organic listings.
Organic search engine optimization is done by optimizing the web
pages of your site itself and by creating link popularity which
drives your website to the top for the chosen search terms.
In this article, we will review the advantages and drawbacks of
each method of search engine placement.
A myth exists that organic search engine optimization is cheap.
It isn’t. If you are targeting a search term along the lines
of “web hosting”, you’ll be looking at a minimum
of five figures per year.
Even so, organic pay per click is most often more cost effective
than pay per click. Organic search engine placement is often done
by creating link popularity, and it is often a link popularity that
endures long afterwards.
One of the drawbacks of organic search engine placement is the
time required to get your website to the top. Insofar as search
engines do not update their indices daily or even weekly, it can
two months or more to see the full effects of a professional optimization
job.
The primary benefit of pay per click is the immediate results and
complete control it offers the advertiser. You can commit $50, or
$50,000. You may target one set of keywords today, and if they don’t
work out you may target an entirely different set of keywords tomorrow.
As a short term strategy, pay per click is ideal. The drawback
of PPC is the cost. A top position for some search terms can cost
thousands or tens of thousands of dollars each day. Over the long
term, organic search engine optimization is much more cost effective.
There is a rule of thumb in advertising. It says that if a campaign
achieves full ROI, it is worth doing. That is to say, if the cost
of advertising is earned back by the ad, it’s worth doing.
By this standard, you may often justify the cost of PPC. But the
fact remains that it leaves you with little or no margin.
The purpose of organic search engine optimization is to increase
those margins.
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