SEO Or PPC: Which Should You Choose?

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seo or ppc: which should you choose?

SEO and PPC are two of the most common strategies employed by start-up companies and SMEs, and understanding the pros and cons of these marketing techniques is essential when it comes to getting the best for your business.

And of course, you also want to be sure that your funds are being used in the most effective way possible and that any marketing tactics you use will generate the maximum profit. If you are uncertain whether SEO or PPC would be a better approach for your business, read on for a closer look at both of these strategies.

SEO

It’s essential that you have some clear understanding of what SEO, or search engine optimization is, what local SEO is and what the results might mean for your company. The consensus is that SEO is more useful for companies in different industries as customers looking at search engine results are over eight times more likely to click on organic results than in a PPC ad. However, if you are faced with an extremely competitive target market, getting organic search results can be a challenge as well as an often lengthy process.

However, being able to stay ahead of the curve is a must if you adopt SEO as a strategy, as algorithms often change, and many see this as a drawback. It’s also important to realize that effective SEO is more about being able to keep your position in the search engine rankings once you have obtained it.

PPC

Firstly, you will need to budget more for PPC, as it can be very costly to maintain. PPC, or pay per click, is a paid search advertising approach, in which you are paying a small amount whenever a customer clicks on your campaign. There is a much lower chance of getting your company’s name noticed in those all-important search engine results, although PPC offers a much higher conversion rate, with customers about 1.5 times more likely to convert.

So Which is Better?

Your company’s digital marketing budget will be a significant factor in deciding whether PPC or SEO is a better strategy for you. If you don’t have as large a budget as you would like, and the target keywords are very competitive, it can become very costly to use PPC, even though you can impose small bid limits on each campaign.

With SEO, you shouldn’t expect to see positive results immediately, as it really should be seen as a true invested, yielding results over the long term. In general, you can expect to enjoy better results the longer you invest in SEO. One benefit is that you tend to know fairly accurately just what you are getting for your money, as a monthly retainer can be used. The bottom line is that you need to be somewhat patient; if you are the kind of person that expects instant results, then you may find that this isn’t the right strategy for you and your company.

One recommended step is to find out the average cost of the CPC’s in your specific industry to help you determine whether PPC really can be an effective marketing tool for your company. To help decide whether the budget constraints that you have would support an SEO campaign, you should make a point of finding out just how competitive the SERPs are in your particular industry.

There are some questions you should be asking yourself if you are trying to decide if a PPC campaign or a strategy that relies more on SEO would be a more effective solution for your company. As you can see, there are pros and cons to both of these marketing methods, and you want to be sure you choose the strategy that works for you. And of course, the available budget is also something that has to be considered, and whether a PPC strategy justifies the extra expense.

If you aren’t sure which strategy would work best for you or if both strategies may be best, talk to the SEO experts here at Coronation Internet Marketing. We can provide you with a free SEO analysis for your business website.

How to Use PPC to Support Your SEO Efforts

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Use PPC to support your SEO featured image

The effects of PPC campaigns and SEO are quite complementary and can be amplified when you implement both within your digital marketing strategy. At the top of SERPs are paid search ads and below are all organic search results – it would be best to capture your audience at their point of search through both of these channels. Therefore it is important to know how to optimise your digital marketing strategy between PPC and SEO.

Here are five ways to use PPC to support your SEO efforts:

Identify Keywords That Convert

A significant advantage of PPC campaigns on your SEO efforts is that you can identify which of your keywords are resulting in conversions. Identifying your best-converting keywords can help with choosing what keywords to focus on regarding keyword rankings. You wouldn’t want to funnel your efforts into a high volume keyword that doesn’t convert well, would you? The major upside of using PPC to kick off your SEO is the saving of time. Test out keywords through PPC and find out what keywords don’t work, so you can drop them from your efforts and push your resources towards other more important keywords.

Most of your keyword research should have been completed through Google Adwords Keyword Planner Tool so knowing how many clicks you can get for keywords and analyse the interactions and site engagement of users over time will be very useful in understanding how you should approach your link building – especially keywords, anchor text and for what landing page to rank for specific keywords.

Content Optimization on Landing Pages

With conversion tracking setup on your site, you understand what types of actions your site visitors are performing. Whether it be lead through a signup, clicking on a link to a page, clicking on an element on the page or so on, it is a great advantage to know how well your landing page content engages a visitor and achieves leads and sales.

Through the fast testing of ads, you can identify which copy entices clicks and interactions from your audience.
Using the best performing PPC ad copy and implementing aspects of it into your organic content strategy can help you write up compelling title tags, meta descriptions and page content.

Create More Link Building Opportunities

If you play your cards right with driving leads through paid search campaigns, you can utilise your gathered leads to acquire social shares and backlinks on blogs and websites. For example, you can bulk email out a newsletter or promotion where if the person shares your post on social media or their blog, they can receive a special offer or discount on your site.

You can bring in more exposure to your site content when your paid search audience browses your site. Internal page visibility is a big bonus if you have lots of quality linkable content because you never know if your audience might share your content. If you’re very confident in your site content, you could even set up some of your ads to lead directly to your linkable assets.

mobile phone with Google

Capture Your Missed Audiences

If you’re starting off fresh with a website that doesn’t have any popular keywords, you can start building up brand awareness and driving traffic through the use of PPC campaigns. With the ability to bid on your non-ranking keywords, you can compensate for your low keyword visibility and capture the audience that you would’ve otherwise missed.

SEO tends to take months to gain real traction regarding results, and as a long term strategy that is quite dependent on the competition in your line of business, you can straight away get some action happening before you even hit the top keyword positions. You’ll save 6-12 months if you’re not on the first page already and if you’re already on the first page, it might take as long even to reach the top 5 results. Sometimes businesses will be time constrained, so PPC would be a good option to acquire traffic on the first page while SEO gradually improves.

Remarketing

Being able to bring back traffic to your site is useful especially if your audience happens to click on multiple ads and organic results on the SERPs – your competitors, your ads and also your organic search results. You won’t always win over your audience so being able to pull them back through remarketing ads is a blessing in that there are additional chances of a conversion.

Sometimes your landing pages for paid search or organic search might see high bounce rates due to the user having too many options available from the search results, so it is important to make sure that your remarketing ads are written such that they are compelling and appeal to the audience’s emotions and senses. You’d want to use language that entices them to come back to your site and take action. Imagine being ranked in the top 5 and a user finds you through organic search but holds off a purchase decision or simply forgets about your site. Ad impressions will remind people of your site whether it be through regular search ads or display ads, but remarketing takes the cake for pulling them back once they’ve clicked on any of those ads.

raymond tang

Raymond Tang is a digital marketing specialist at Sparro Digital Marketing Agency based in Sydney, Australia and has substantial interests in sharing his knowledge and insights in the digital marketing space. Working across SEO, PPC and content, he aims to improve the online presence of brands he works with, learning more every day and sharing tips with others in the field.

Adwords Brand Hijacking by The Yellow Pages

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adwords brand hijacking by the yellow pages

We regularly do brand search tests for our clients via a Google search to see what pages are showing on the first page of search results. Doing searches like this is done to see if there are any negative listings on that first page of results.

During one of our searches for Hillside Law in Penticton BC, a client of ours, we discovered that a competitor of their’s was hijacking their business name for Google Adwords pay-per-click marketing. We’ve seen this done before to other clients of ours in a different industry. As far as we are concerned, this is a less than ethical means of getting clicks to a website via a competitor’s business name.

See the video below to see how we discovered it.

We did a search for “Hillside Law Penticton” in Google. Below is a screenshot of what appeared. We’ve highlighted the search term showing in AdWords.

hillside law penticton adwords hijacking

Not only did they use the Hillside Law business name in their ad, but it also shows up above Hillside Law’s listing.

The way this is done in AdWords is as follows:

  1. In Google AdWords, you add your competitor’s name as one of your keywords. (e.g. “Hillside Law”)
  2. You set up your ad title to be a variable based on what someone is searching. So if someone is searching for “Hillside Law”, it shows up in the ad title.

When we did further research to see which business was doing this, we discovered that their competitor was using the Yellow Pages to manage their Google AdWords account. You would think that a company the size of the Yellow Pages wouldn’t lower themselves to this level to get business for their clients. What’s even worse is that they did it for a client in the legal field.

In our opinion, this is an unethical way to do pay-per-click marketing, and this is why we are letting everyone know what the Yellow Pages is doing. We have informed our client, and we will be reporting this to Google to have these ads taken down.

We encourage everyone to expose competitors who are using this practice, especially the Yellow Pages.

Article first published at http://coronationim.com/adwords-brand-hijacking/

5 Ways To Ensure Your Paid Traffic Converts

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paid traffic sep

Are You Paying For Traffic But Not Getting Results?

Use These 5 Tips To Convert Visitors into Buyers

Every company wants more traffic to their web pages. After all, there is a direct correlation between traffic and sales. The more targeted traffic you have, the more sales you can expect as a result of your efforts.

So how can you attract more targeted traffic to your pages?

There are numerous methods to increase traffic online such as search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing on social media platforms. Both strategies are effective to reach target audiences and build brand awareness. But the downside is that it takes the time actually to start seeing results. With SEO for example, it can easily take months or even longer to rank on the first page of the search results.

What makes paid search such an attractive option then is the potential to drive immediate traffic to your landing pages.

With Google AdWords, you bid on keywords that are relevant to your business. Ads you create are then displayed in the search results where prospective customers can click (or tap) through to learn more about your offer. But traffic alone won’t guarantee sales as conversions depend on some factors from how compelling your offer is to how well the site is designed.

Here we at look at five ways to ensure that paid search traffic converts.

1. Build Targeted Landing Pages

Sending paid traffic to the home page is a common mistake that many business owners make.

Imagine you were searching for outdoor hiking boots and you click on an ad that matches your search query. But then the ad takes you to the home page which displays other offers that are not relevant to your search. The chances of you converting are relatively small in this case.

The importance of relevance throughout each step cannot be stressed enough as illustrated in the example above. Landing pages that closely match a search query are far more likely to convert. So to maximize your paid search efforts, build out relevant landing pages for each ad group to increase conversions. This approach requires far more effort but is well worth it.

2. Include Testimonials

Social proof is defined as:

“a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation.”

In other words, behavior is greatly influenced by external factors which also extends to purchasing decisions. If a product you were interested in has mostly positive reviews, you would be more confident about your purchase. But if the reviews are overwhelmingly negative, you would likely think twice about it.

This is an example of how social proof can affect sales.

One way to leverage it in your marketing is to include testimonials and customer reviews on your landing pages. Here is an example of social proof in action on the Dropbox business page:convert seo

Social proof is a way to leverage the credibility of other firms. Use testimonials on your landing pages to increase conversions.

3. Implement Remarketing

Visitors to your landing page may decide not to purchase for various reasons.

Unless you collect their email addresses, those visitors would be lost forever. Remarketing is a feature in AdWords that lets you reach visitors who have previously visited your site. A tracking pixel allows you to “follow” visitors as they browse the web.google seo in vancouver

The benefits are obvious.

Remarketing enables you to segment your audience so you can make your ads even more targeted. If a visitor lands on an individual product page, you could then display ads that are related to that page. Using Remarketing enables you to convert visitors who may have previously left without making a purchase.

4. Split Test Ads

Split testing is perhaps the best use of your ad spend.

The way it works is relatively straightforward. Instead of having only one ad for an ad group, you create a second ad with a minor change to the headline or description. Then you let the ads run for a period while the data collects. google ads seo

Split testing is a highly effective strategy that can be used to increase the click through rates of your ads. Once you find a winning ad, create another one. Split testing can also be used to measure conversion rates for your landing pages. But be sure to let the ads run so that sufficient data is collected to make an informed decision.

5. Improve Loading Times

Loading times are another overlooked aspect.

Even with a well-designed website, the reality is that visitors will not stick around if a page takes too long to load. In fact, 47% of consumers expect pages to load in 2 seconds or less. Every second count as a few seconds delay can have a negative impact on conversions.

Take steps to boost loading times to increase conversions. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool for a complete analysis of the desktop and mobile versions of your site.

vancouver seoThen follow the suggestions to improve loading times.

6. Collect Email Addresses

Not all traffic to your landing pages will convert.

Visitors leave a page without making a purchase for various reasons. They might need more time to research their options, or they may have only gotten distracted with something else. Collecting email addresses can be incredibly lucrative as it gives your business another opportunity to convert visitors with drip email campaigns.

In fact, email delivers one of the highest ROI compared to other marketing channels:

seo vanGive visitors a compelling reason to enter their email addresses. Offer an exclusive guide or other content that visitors can download instantly. With email, you have yet another marketing channel to drive more sales to your business.

Conclusion

Paid search is one of the best marketing channels to drive more targeted traffic to your landing pages. Platforms such as Google AdWords offer an excellent ROI when compared to other channels. To maximize your marketing efforts, follow the strategies as outlined above to boost your conversion rates and increase sales.

roy dopaishiRoy Dopaishi manages content marketing at Paidtraffic – the experts at Google Adwords and Pay Per Click advertising for small and medium businesses. Paid Traffic is a digital marketing agency powered by Digital Monopoly. Paid Traffic was launched in early 2016 with the sole purpose of providing results oriented pay per click advertising on Google and other PPC platforms.

Paid Traffic specializes at helping small and medium businesses maximize inquiries and sales through Google AdWords, clients start at any budget and pay only for results. Facebook + Twitter

Why We Believe SEO Is Better Than PPC

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A number of our clients and leads here at Coronation Internet Marketing ask us both about search engine optimization and pay-per-click using Google Adwords. They ask “Which one is better?” or “Should I do both?”. These are both great questions. But, we feel that search engine optimization (SEO) is a better return on investment than pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.

What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC)?

It’s exactly how it sounds. You, the advertiser, agrees to pay the search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo a pre-determined sum of money for each click the search engine receives on that ad that is then directed to your website. So, you are paying every time somebody clicks on your ad.

SEO vs. PPC

Advertising campaigns using PPC often need just as much time and effort to setup and get started as SEO does. PPC also requires ongoing management such as making sure you have bid enough to remain at the top of the first page. In comparison, SEO, when done correctly, has about the same initial setup, requires less monthly maintenance and delivers results consistently.

The biggest issue with PPC is that the prices are increasing all of the time. Your competitors who want to be found at the top of the first page need to outbid you to be in the position that you are or were. This can significantly reduce your return on investment for the keyword phrases you want to be found for. Whereas, there isn’t any bidding required to be found on the first page with SEO.

We have a large client that does SEO and PPC. They asked us about why the total clicks to their website from their PPC advertising had reduced this year over last when they were paying the same amount each month to Google for their PPC advertising. The reason for this was that the bidding had gone up for each of their keywords which means they are paying more for each click, thus getting less visitors to their website each month.

According to searchenginewatch.com, over 90% of clicks that come from the first page of search results are from natural listings and not PPC. This number keeps climbing due to people becoming desensitized to PPC ads. You will get much more traffic from SEO as people who are performing searches are clicking the natural search engine results versus pay-per-click ads.

You can get better conversions from natural/organic listings in search results. These listings convert up to 25% better than PPC listings due to things like click fraud and window shoppers instead of buyers.

Conclusion

Natural listings convert better. When SEO is done correctly it can deliver you more money over the long term than compared to the always rising costs of PPC.

So ask yourself “Which one do you want to focus on?”