|
|
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
|
 |
|
| Example of a pay per click advert on Google | |
 |
- Geographic targetting of PPC adverts is getting better and for local businesses this could be a very cost effective way to market your website.
- You only pay when someone goes to your website. Whether they are the right person depends on how well you manage your PPC campaign.
- You know exactly how much you will be paying per visitor to your website so you can budget and forecast much more accurately.
- Our experience is that PPC visitors are far more likely to want to buy our service than vistors that came via natural search results, but this may not apply to every industry.
- You start getting results within minutes of setting up your campaign.
- You are in full control of the budget, keywords and advert text.
- The monitoring provided by Google is excellent. If used properly this can rapidly lead to more sales or enquiries at lower cost.
Pay per click - the disadvantages
- If you set a high daily budget to start with, you could end up spending a lot of money. Start low and build up slowly.
- It does involve mental effort. Do not underestimate the amount of work involved to get it right. If you get someone else to manage your campaign make sure you choose a reputable company, and remember that they will need to be paid.
Search engine optimisation - the advantages
 |
|
| Example of a 'natural' search listing | |
|
- Traffic to your website is effectively free once you have paid the cost of having your website optimised.
- Overall cost per visitor could be very low if the SEO company does a very good job.
- For fairly esoteric or localised businesses SEO may bring better results than PPC. With PPC your adverts are shown to a wide geographical area (but see below).
- If you are prepared to do some legwork you can do your own SEO, but you should cost your time into the equation.
Search engine optimisation - the disadvantages
- You pay before you get the traffic, so you may have to work hard to get your money back if you don't get the traffic.
- Search engines take a while to update their results so you may not see results for up to a few months. Your cashflow will be worse initially than with pay per click because you have to pay a lump to the SEO company up front.
- Cost per visitor could be very high if the SEO company does not get you good results.
- Picking the wrong SEO company could get your website banned permanently from some search engines. Some SEO companies use tricks to try to fool the search engines into giving higher rankings. The results might be great initially, but it's a big risk.
- Be sure that the keywords you are being found under are the words potential customers would use to find your product or service, rather than ones that are easy for the SEO company to get ranked highly. Otherwise you may end up with lots of visitors and no sales, or high ranking but few visitors.
- You will need to be patient. It will take months or years for you to build up your ranking. If you want results today rather than in a few months - use pay per click.
Conclusion
For most small businesses the speed of results, better cashflow, and predictability of PPC, make it the first choice. Once you have a few months worth of results under your belt it may be worth showing these to an SEO company and asking if they can improve on them.
It's definitely worth doing your own search engine optimisation as you build up your website content, but don't get obsessed with it, remember that your primary audience is people not machines.
It is vital that your website is built in the right way for search engines. And you'll need to be able to easily edit the elements of your pages that search engines look for - that's where a 123Live content managed website comes in.
