Looking at two of the systems of advertising your organisation using Online Marketing in terms of their positive and negative features may help you to select which method to use for your own organisation.
Firstly we will consider the pay per click system, a way of making certain that you are visible to the people searching for your chosen keywords by paying for a Search Engine Placement in the sponsored links section of the search results page. This system has a number of positive attributes. The largest is the speed at which results are provided. To set up a campaign like this takes less than an hour and within 7 days you will have some very helpful information about how it is going. Visitors to your site will grow immediately and as long as you are providing what the searcher understood that you were selling from your pay per click ad your sales should follow not far behind.
Another great feature of the pay per click method is that if you do happen to get something wrong, say in the choice of your keywords, it is clear very quickly. You can identify in a matter of days that although you are getting a lot of clicks through to your website no one is purchasing anything. This will prompt you to review your campaign before too much money has been chucked down the drain. It is possible with pay per click to quantify your budget and therefore plan financially knowing that you will pay no more that the limit you yourself have chosen.
On the negative side it can still work out very expensive as enquiries (clicks) go up, so too does your bill, whereas the price of other forms of advertising stays steady no matter how many customers it brings. Also there is proven data that shows that organic Search Engine Placement listings attract ten times the number of clicks that pay per click do, suggesting that a lot of searchers would prefer not to use them.
Now turning to Search Engine Optimization we can see a much slower method. As it is organic or natural it tends to take a matter of weeks before any progress is made and then as the clients website slowly climbs to page 1 the sales start to increase steadily over a subsequent period. This is absolutely no quick fix. Another problem with it, unlike pay per click, is that because of it’s speed, if you do get the keywords slightly out at the outset you will have wasted a lot of effort before you actually identify the error. This is one of the reasons why getting some expert advice from a Search Engine Optimization Company may well be a cost effective option.
On the up side if you do have an ongoing sales organisation the effort and the wait is definitely worth it. The costs from the search engine optimization company, after an initial fee are normally a small amount, say ?15 per week for every keyword that achieves a search engine placement ranking on page 1. Bearing in mind the increased number of customers to your site from the organic listing this works out far far more cost effective than pay per click.
So generally it seems that pay per click is brilliant for immediate business and for one off sales. Whereas Search engine optimization appears to lend itself to the online marketing of steady medium to long term business.
