Texas SEO Company Blog

It seems that there is some kind of plague going around causing companies to spend money on pay per click advertising instead of good old-fashioned SEO. We’re talking about to the tune of $9.1 billion vs. $1.3 billion. This is a little bit disturbing when you consider that 80% of the clicks from search queries are on organic search listings and not pay per click ads.

But let me define a few of these terms for you:

• SEO - Search engine optimization. The practice of using keywords and links to increase the chances that web pages rank in the search engines for specific, targeted keywords.
• PPC - Pay per click advertising. The practice of bidding on keywords to achieve a sponsored listing ranking in the search engines results pages when searchers make keyword-based queries.
• Organic search listings - The listings that come up naturally as a result of a search query in one of the search engines. Not PPC ads or sponsored listings.
• Search query - What a searcher makes at a search engine when they want to find something.
• Sponsored listing - A PPC ad, which you have to pay for.

Given that 80% of searchers who enter a search query click on the organic search listing and not the PPC ad or sponsored listing, you’d think more people would see the value in being listed higher in the search results and put their budgeted marketing dollars toward that. But that’s not what is happening.

My best advice for companies that want long-term results, as opposed to short-term results, is to put some of your marketing budget toward search engine optimization. You can still do PPC. Allocate 75% of your budget to PPC and 25% to SEO, initially. After you see results from your PPC, start funneling more of your budget toward search engine optimization. After you hit a financial milestone, move 10% or 20% of your budget to SEO and do that until you hit 80% for SEO and 20% for PPC. By utilizing this kind of strategy you can capitalize on short-term results and use your gains from those to bolster your long-term staying power.

Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing your business or website through the search engines. More accurately, it can be defined as seeking to influence search engine rankings through search engine optimization and paid search listings.

Paid listings can be just as effective as organic listings, but they are effective in a different way. First, you have an expense associated with any paid listings you add to your search engine marketing campaigns. There may or may not be an expense associated with any organic listings attained, depending on whether or not you pay an SEO to handle your marketing. Paid search listings can also influence your organic listings.

Only about 25% of searchers online will click on the paid search listings. The other 75% will click on the organic listings and those that do are usually more educated and in higher income brackets than paid search listing clickers. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use paid search listings as a part of your search engine marketing.

I’d say paid search listings are best used as an adjunct to your organic SEO efforts. You can use paid search for many useful applications and here are a few that I’d recommend:

• Use paid search to refine your keyword list related to your Search engine marketing campaigns
• Drive traffic to your website before it attains search listings
• Target specific keywords that your search engine optimization doesn’t hit effectively
• Find new keywords that work for your search engine marketing campaigns
• Test landing page content to see if it converts
• Increase the sales that you are making from your organic efforts

Because paid search adds expenses to your marketing budget, you need to first make sure your landing pages convert. Sometimes it is best to do that through organic efforts and sometimes you can actually use your paid search listings to test the landing pages. Either way, you must measure your ROI and make decisions about the effectiveness of your overall marketing efforts based on your findings. It’s a lot of work, but the search engine marketing rewards are legion.