How to Co-ordinate SEO & PPC?
Internet marketing has never been more important. In the current economic climate, a growing number of stores are closing down as they struggle to justify their maintenance, with the subsequent focus being directed towards a business's online presence. With this shift in focus, it is important that websites attract the right customers, this is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) techniques come into play, as each one will help to direct traffic towards your website. This is why it's important to successfully co-ordinate your SEO and PPC campaigns. The important thing to consider is that whilst the two are best used in conjunction with one another, they are different features and each has different benefits. The main differences being cost, where they are displayed, and traffic potential, with these differences in mind you can synchronise SEO and PPC campaigns to achieve the best results. As Pay Per Click suggests, the cost is per click and may depend on how highly you want to feature and how competitive your market is, whereas SEO's cost doesn't exist in terms of money, however, it does require a lot of time and dedication, spent doing things such as building a great site, generating online awareness about your site, optimising your HTML code and possibly even hiring an SEO expert as a consultant. Perhaps the most noticeable difference between the two is the location of your listing on the search engine results page, PPC featuring more prominently, for example on Google results pages they are displayed at the top and on the right-hand side. Whilst this may increase traffic to your website in a relatively short amount of time, most studies show users are three to five times as likely to click on a site in the organic listings as to click on a paid ad in the search engines. Another key difference between SEO and PPC is traffic potential. Setting up a paid campaign is generally much faster, as it can be realised in a couple of days, however it can be a continuous process to efficiently manage it. SEO, once set up, has much longer-lasting effects than PPC, as the minute that a PPC campaign is stopped, the traffic dries up completely. It may be beneficial to use both SEO and PPC to direct traffic to different areas of your site, depending on the relevance of each one. By having both SEO and PPC campaigns working in conjunction with each other, companies can rapidly increase their search engine visibility, direct the desired traffic to the most relevant part of their website, and simultaneously collect keyword data from two campaigns.