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Organic SEO or Pay-Per-Click Advertising - Which Should You Choose?
Author Scott Buresh
By Scott Buresh
When people hear about online marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods that a company can use to enhance its visibility on the Web: organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising.
In an ideal world, you would use both strategically to maximize your site's profile. However, budgetary constraints often make this impossible, and trying to do both on a limited budget or with minimal resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results. In this case, it's usually better to focus on one or the other. But which is best for you?
Organic Search Engine Optimization
Organic search engine optimization campaigns offer several distinct advantages over pay-per-click advertising campaigns, as many recent studies have shown. What follows is a brief listing of some of the findings.
Propensity to Click
Study after study indicates people are less likely to click on paid search ads rather than on results from organic search engine optimization. For example, one study found that search users are up to six times more likely to click on the first few organic results than they are to choose any of the paid results[1], while an eye tracking study[2] showed that 50 percent of users begin their search by scanning the top organic results. Other studies have shown that only 30 percent of search engine users click on paid listings, leaving an overwhelming 70 percent who are clicking the organic listings.[3] And a 2003 study found that 85 percent of searchers report clicking on paid links in less than 40 percent of all of their searches, and 78 percent of all respondents claim that they found the information they we searching for through sponsored links just 40 percent of the time.[4]
Trust
Studies are beginning to indicate that the trust level for organic results is much higher than that of paid results, and that paid results are looked upon as a nuisance by some searchers. One study found that only 14 percent of searchers trust paid listings, and 29 percent report being "annoyed" by them.[5] Another study found that 66 percent of customers distrust paid ads.[6] Clearly, it's not generally a good idea to upset potential customers before they even click on your link.
Value of Visitors
Organic search engine results tend to be seen as non-biased, and they therefore are able to provide visitors that are more valuable. The overall conversion rate, or the rate at which searchers take a desired action on a site, is 17 percent higher for unpaid search results than the rate for paid (4.2% vs. 3.6%).[7] Trends also have shown that more of the sales that result from search engines originated in organic search listings.[8]
Visitors Becoming More Aware of Pay-Per-Click as Advertising
As more and more people turn to the Internet for research and information, more searchers are becoming aware of paid results as a marketing tool. One study showed that not only are 38 percent of searchers aware of the distinction between paid and unpaid results, 54 percent are aware of the distinction on Google, which is widely recognized as the most popular search engine.[9]
Pay-Per-Click Costs Rising
Meanwhile, pay-per-click costs are rising steadily. Between October 2004 and December 2005, average keyword prices rose from around $25 to just under $55.[10] And the cost of keywords can increase by as much as 100 percent during the holiday season.[11] These costs aren't going unnoticed either; one study of problems experienced by U.S. companies found that 57 percent of respondents felt that their desired keywords were "too expensive," while 51 percent expressed concern that they are overpaying for certain keywords.[12] On the other hand, when you outsource to an organic search engine optimization firm, your costs will likely remain more stable than the prices for pay-per-click advertising.
Long Term Results
While a pay-per-click campaign may produce results more quickly than an organic search engine optimization campaign, organic search engine optimization campaigns can give you results that last. When the budget runs out for a pay-per-click campaign, or when your company decides that the pay-per-click campaign should be terminated, the results end as well. With organic search engine optimization, the optimized site content and other changes made to your site can have an impact on your search results until the next change in a search engine's algorithm, or possibly even beyond.
Relevance
Users also have rated organic search engine results as more relevant than paid results. On Google, 72.3 percent felt that organic results were more relevant, while only 27.7 percent rated paid results as more relevant. Yahoo offered similar results, with 60.8 calling organic results relevant compared to only 39.2 percent for paid.[13]
Pay-Per-Click
While the above statistics may make organic search engine optimization seem the clear choice in all cases, in certain situations it actually can make more sense to do pay-per-click advertising. For those looking for fast results on a small budget, a pay-per-click campaign may be the answer.
Results
As previously stated, the results from pay-per-click advertising are immediate. On the other hand, an organic search engine optimization campaign may take up to three months or more for results to be apparent. In this case, pay-per-click is advantageous for those who are looking to promote an initiative that will go live in a short amount of time, or whose business is seasonal in nature and who only do promotion during certain months of the year.
Budget
Small businesses with extremely tight budgets may find that pay-per-click is a better investment than organic search engine optimization because a pay-per-click campaign will almost always cost less - good search engine optimization companies simply do not work for $100 per month. By limiting a campaign's keyphrases to highly specific terms relevant to a company's business, there will not be a large amount of traffic generated, but the traffic that is generated will be specific to the desired result. Plus, choosing such specific phrases can make them less expensive on a per click basis. Moreover, in niche markets with a high average dollar sale, where there's not a great amount of search activity because the prospect pool is limited, it may not make sense to engage a quality organic search engine optimization firm at several thousand dollars per month when you can instead buy varying niche-specific keyphrases and generate traffic in that way.
Easier to Handle In-House
Non-complicated pay-per-click campaigns can be handled much more easily in-house than an organic search engine optimization campaign. Such campaigns generally involve business to business and high-end, service oriented companies, not those geared toward a large consumer base. Since organic search engine optimization requires a steep learning curve and since there are so many questionable tactics that can put a site at risk of penalization (the tactics that neophytes to search engine optimization are likely to use), it may make more sense to run a pay-per-click campaign. Since you are dealing directly with the engine, i.e., Yahoo Search Marketing and Google AdWords, you don't need to pay a middleman, and these sites offer helpful tutorials on how to use pay-per-click marketing. Perhaps most importantly, the concept of pay-per-click is much easier to grasp and understand at the outset.
No Contracts
Most organic search engine optimization campaigns require a contract of a certain length because SEO companies know that meaningful results will rarely happen overnight. When dealing with an in-house pay-per-click campaign, obviously a contract is not an issue. But in general, even when you are dealing with an agency, you will not tend to need to sign a contract because the agency instead makes money on a percentage of the spend, although there may be a setup fee. Without a contract, you are free to reallocate marketing dollars elsewhere if you discover that the pay-per-click campaign is not providing the desired results.
Conclusion
Clearly, organic search engine optimization has some distinct advantages over pay-per-click advertising. However, there are undoubtedly certain situations and scenarios where pay-per-click advertising makes more sense fiscally and strategically. With a high enough budget, you would be able to have an effective organic search engine optimization campaign running in tandem with an effective pay-per-click campaign. But if you have to choose one, look into your unique situation before you decide.
Why Your First Online Business Should Be Google Adsense
By Andrew Shim
Since its launch in 2003, the Google Adsense program has revolutionized web publishing, translating visitors' clicks into money, turning blogs and websites into money making machines for millions of website owners.
The Adsense program is a big revenue generator for Google, too. The company earned some $2.7 billion in Adsense revenues last year. If you're thinking of making money online here are some reasons why your first online business should be Google Adsense :
Google Adsense is FREE and EASY
You first need to apply to join the Adsense program via an online form. Once you've been accepted into the program, you will be given a snippet of code containing your unique ID to paste into your website to enable the ads to appear. It's that simple to start making money with Adsense.
With Google Adsense Everybody can make money
With Google Adsense, it doesn't matter if your website is big or small. The amount of money you make is generally proportional to the traffic that your website attracts. No site is too small to make money. Even if you could make an extra ten dollars a day (which is really very achievable) by just pasting a snippet of code into your web pages, I'd call that a great way to make money!
No worries about finding advertisers
Finding the right advertisers and the right place to advertise can be a tricky business for both publishers and advertisers.Google, by their sheer size is a magnet that attracts advertisers and publishers for all sorts of products and services. They become the broker between publishers and advertisers. All you need to do is concentrate on your website.
Great for beginners
The majority of newbies who try to make money on the Internet call it quits within twelve months, not because they want to, but because they get lost in the jungle of online money-making. This leads to frustration and disappointment and eventually, defeat. Google Adsense cuts a clear and simple path for everyone to follow – join the program, paste the code, improve your website content and get paid when people click on the ads.
Google is great
Google is on the cutting edge of search engine and pay-per-click technology. Even as Adsense became the spectacular success that it is today, Google never stopped developing and refining ways to help regular people with regular websites monetize their traffic. They have some of the best brains working for them.
Making money while you sleep
I can honestly say that I make money while I sleep. Round the clock, every click earns me anywhere from 5 cents to a couple of dollars. Since joining the Adsense program, my day starts off bright and cheery with a visit to my reports page that tells me how much I earned while sleeping!
Earnings grow with your website.
While Adsense does generate more income on certain types of websies than other less popular niche sites, the general consensus is that as long as you continue to build on your website's popularity and add good, useful content, your Adsense income WILL continue to grow. More traffic logically equals more clicks and more money.
Small change for some, BIG money for others
Perhaps the ones who are reaping the greatest benefit from the Adsense program are the publishers from the developing world. While a US100 dollar check may not mean very much to a webmaster in New York, it can mean a couple months salary to someone in Africa. Stories abound in Adsense-related websites and forums of how this program has changed the lives of thousands of people. Many have been able to make a comfortable living solely on the income derived from the Adsense program.
Earning money with Google Adsense gives new website owners hope and a clear sense of direction. Even if you earn 50 cents a day at first, it opens your eyes to the possibilities that Google Adsense presents. It's a straightforward way to make money compared to the often complex path of affiliate marketing. There's every reason to believe that Google Adsense can only get bigger and better, so it makes perfect sense that every newcomer to online money making should give the Adsense program a try.
How and Why to RSS
by Richard Keir
RSS feeds and blogs (and blog and pinging) are part of the latest hyper-frenzy in internet marketing. Tools and services are mushrooming all over. But there seem to be some rather distorted ideas about all this.
Unless you want to get into the technical stuff, exactly what an RSS feed is doesn't really matter. Now I care because I use them for a lot of things, work with code and do geeky tech stuff. But from a marketing perspective the underlying technical structure is only relevant because it clues us in on what to use an RSS feed for. And that's the thing you have to understand.
An RSS marketing feed is not about the feed's content in most cases. Feeds that carry large quantities of content are usually referred to as data feeds and that's not what people are going to put in their RSS aggregators. A basic RSS feed consists of a varied number of items with title, a link to the full content source and a short extract or description from the full source. There's more but that's the basics.
If you subscribe (by email) to something like the daily New York Times headlines, think about what a typical item looks like:
++++ Big deal thing happens somewhere ++++ By A Writer
++++ Once again an astonishing big deal thing has happened...
++++ Read Full Article: URL-link-to-news-story
Title and author - short description - link to full content
Just like an RSS feed item.
What should be obvious from this example is that RSS feeds are about change. New content. Updated information. They are not about static content.
The group you want to reach, people who surf via RSS, are looking for an efficient, fast way to identify new content that they are interested in. So if you're going to do an RSS feed, you need it to link to and report on new and updated content.
There are lots of tools available that will let you create your own feeds, manually or with varying degrees of automation. One of the most popular means is by blogging. You really don't need any technical knowledge at all to set up a blog and produce a feed.
You can use a blog just as a feed generator. Basically this is what blog and ping software and services are doing. That kind of feed is not for people, it's for the search engines. It's a way to alert the SEs that a new site with un-indexed pages exists. Blogs used that way are not what I'm talking about here.
You can create a blog about anything. What's important is that new content is added regularly. There are many ways to add valuable content to a blog. You needn't be a brilliant writer, many don't require much or any writing.
The best way to check this out for yourself is to blog-surf. No matter what kind of site you have - or what kind of product you want to promote - there's always a way to write about it, find new information, check and report on similar or related products and sites, report on industry news, provide your own opinions and ideas. As most people quickly discover, it's far easier than it sounds at first.
Your blog will produce at least one RSS type feed. Blogger produces just an atom feed, WordPress and other blog software normally produce one or 2 types of RSS feeds and an atom feed. Services like feedburner.com can allow you to "burn" your feed and then promote a single burned url which will provide any kind of feed a user wants.
Now that you have content and an RSS / atom feed that links to that content, your next step is to publicize your feed. You have two different main avenues since your blog has real content.
First you can add your feed to RSS search engines and RSS directories.
And second, because your blog has that real content and isn't just an RSS feed generator, you can add your blog to blog search engines and blog directories. You could even use blog traffic exchanges like BlogExplosion.
This is a simple, low - or basically zero - cost, yet highly effective way to get new traffic from at least two sources.
First from your RSS feed. Feeds are an increasingly popular way to save time, search and surf. If your content is valuable and interesting people will subscribe to your feed and click thru to those full articles or posts that interest them -- targeted traffic from a group that is relatively affluent and tech savvy.
Second, blogs are extremely popular. A good blog will get linked, reported, commented on, other blogs may pick up your feed and report items from it. All of this exposure can bring valuable free traffic.
And finally, as an extra good thing, search engines like blogs because of the regularly updated content - they are nuts about fresh content - and the easily spidered structure blogs use. So as your blog pages get indexed in the SEs, you can also get direct search engine traffic.
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