Should I Use SEO or PPC to Generate More Sales for My Business?

One of the common questions I get from clients trying to figure out how to manage their marketing budgets is “Should I use search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to generate more sales for my business?”

SEO embraces all the ways to drive visitors naturally to your website to take advantage of low-cost traffic, including the use of social media.

PPC is simpler to understand, since the concept of paying for ads to drive visitors to purchase products and services is about as interwoven within the fabric of our commercial world as the concept of exchanging money for goods.

In most circumstances, my answer is “You should be using both.”

Although it’s quite common to categorize SEO and PPC as opposing disciplines, they are truly complementary, as explained below.

First of all, let’s review rudimentary points about each.

SEO ADVANTAGES

♦ “Free” Traffic (The traffic may be free, but there is labor involved)
♦ More Traffic (More traffic flows through natural than paid listings)
♦ Building an Asset of Ongoing Traffic (The traffic continues even if you stop doing SEO)
♦ Better ROI (Low-cost traffic means better return on investment)
♦ Competitive Advantage (Fewer business understand and use it)

PPC ADVANTAGES

♦ Instant Results (Set up a campaign now and monitor your results in minutes)
♦ Very Quantifiable Results (Abundant analytics available for paid traffic)
♦ Full Transparency (Each penny can be accounted for)
♦ Ability to Adjust Quickly (Change your ads now and get different results now)
♦ Easy to Target Specific Audiences (Very powerful advantage)
♦ Does Not Require IT Skills (Marketing guys can control this, without consulting with Information Technology professionals)

SEO and PPC SYNERGY

As noted above, it’s best to drive traffic using both SEO and PPC channels to generate better short-term and longer-term performance.

However, they can be used in conjunction with each other to gain greater results.

For example, the immediacy of paid search advertising can be used to determine which keywords would benefit from organic SEO strategies.

Conversely, proper search engine optimization of landing pages leads to better performing paid advertising results and lower costs.

Finally, by having your business show up in natural and paid listings on the same search engine pages, it presents a more dominant presence for a business’s products and services.

For more information, visit The Two Primary Sources of Internet Traffic.

Facebook Advertising – Not For Everyone

Although Facebook is a popular social networking platform, from an advertising perspective, it’s more noteworthy as a large marketplace replete with a generous amount of user demographic data that can be readily translated into more targeted ads to carry your message. But not all products and services are profitably suited to advertising on Facebook.

What Products and Services Sell Best on Facebook?

Facebook primarily caters to individuals inclined towards communicating about their lives to friends and family. Hence, products or services that are business-to-consumer oriented (B2C), have a better opportunity at establishing positive results than a company which is advertising business-to-business (B2B) products or services.

Having said that, if you do sell B2B products/services, recognize that you are more likely to successfully advertise to small business owners who are on Facebook, rather than larger company buyers. (Statistically, there are more of the former).

Facebook is a good advertising channel for generating business for art, music, clubs, shared beliefs (ie. political, religious, social causes, etc.), live events, travel, entertainment or for marketing custom or personalized products, as well as things that express individual tastes and preferences.

Facebook Advertising is Not for Everyone

Some examples of B2B products or services that would not likely yield positive results on Facebook would be technical, industrial, or complex products/services.

Also, if you sell products that can be readily purchased anywhere with a price that is well known, then – unless you have a compelling price – your product may not do well on Facebook.

Facebook Advertising Conclusion

Facebook offers a unique opportunity to demographically target a large audience of users, with qualifiers such as likes and interests, geography, age, gender, single or married, and education level.

Even so, if you have a product or service that fits the criteria outlined in this article, then you would be wise to stick your toes in the water first via market testing to develop and refine your advertising, rather than diving in head first with a large ad budget just because it appears so promising.

Intro to AdWords (Part 3): Buying PPC Ads on Google “Search” or “Content Network”?

When buying traffic (paid advertising) through Google’s Adwords service, there is an important distinction to be understood between buying traffic on Google’s well-known search results pages, and buying traffic on their Content Network.

For many businesses, ONLY advertising on Google’s search pages is the mainstay of their paid traffic strategy.

However, the Content Network is workable for other businesses.

Google’s Content Network includes all the websites that host ads for Google, and whose publishers are paid when their visitors click on the ads.

One advantage of the Content Network is that ad costs are lower than on the search pages.

But since traffic from the Content Networks comprises a different mindset in relation to viewer interest in such ads, these ads not only necessitate a different copywriting strategy, they may simply NOT be workable for a given business.

Of course, in both circumstances, the ads are displayed only when they are contextually relevant. For example, if you are paying to advertise motorcycles, those ads will only show up for people who are searching for motorcycles (for the search page ads), and they will only show up on website pages that have content that has to do with motorcycles (via the Google’s Content Network).

A DIFFERENT MINDSET ON THE CONTENT NETWORK

The thinking underlying the difference between buying ads on search pages and buying ads on the Content Network could be summed up as follows:

1. Paid ads that are displayed on the search pages represent ads that are relevant to what the searcher has actually indicated they are looking for “right now.” So the ads have a greater potential tendency to engage visitors. (Someone searches for “motorcycles” and sees search results for “motorcycles” as well as ads for “motorcycles.”)
2. Paid ads that are displayed on the Content Network, however, are presented to viewers who have already gone to a website for information, and the ads “may” be deemed more of a distraction. However, the ads are still contextually relevant, in the same way they are on the search pages. (Searcher arrives on a website that has an article about “motorcycles” and sees ads about “motorcycles.”)

As an example, let’s say someone is searching for information about “buying a motorcycle.” When the searcher is reviewing the displayed results of his/her search, he will likely also see paid ads from advertisers who are selling motorcycles. Depending upon where such a searcher is in the process of possibly buying a motorcycle, he may, or may not, be interested in advertisements to buy motorcycles at that moment. He may only be interested in free information about the process of selecting motorcycles.

If that same person then clicks on a search result and goes to a website page that has an article on selecting the best motorcycle, the searcher has found something they are interested in. If that website ALSO happens to be hosting Google’s paid ads (as part of the Google Content Network), then the searcher may once again see ads on buying motorcycles. So, an important question would be, “Is this searcher more inclined, or less inclined, to click on an ad about ‘buying motorcycles’ on the web page he/she has visited, as compared to the search page?”

Market testing will provide the answer for any given product or service.

The distinction is significant enough to recognize that if you are interested in maximizing the performance of your ad budget, ads should be tested on the search pages and ads should be tested on the Content Network separately.

On the other hand, the different mindset of the searcher/visitor on the Content Network “MAY” represent a lower cost media opportunity and even a better quality lead. To continue the example above, let’s suppose the searcher elects to read an article on the process of buying motorcycles and as a result of reading the articles, discovers that there is much more to know about this subject than he/she originally considered.

And then let’s suppose this website visitor sees an advertisement for a book on selecting motorcycles.

At this point, such a person may be considerably MORE inclined to click on such an ad, even if the same ad were displayed on the original search results page. And to further emphasize the different mindset that could be established after a searcher lands on a website, what if that same article about the process of buying motorcycles also recommended the reader buy a book?

You can probably imagine your own scenarios where the Content Network could be a better or worse media. Hence, they need to be tested separately.

TEST THE GOOGLE CONTENT NETWORK SEPARATELY

Bear in mind that Google charges less to advertise on their Content Network because it is not as effective for most advertisers. However, not all advertisers are savvy enough to test DIFFERENT ads on the Content Network, so these advertisers are missing out on a potential opportunity to generate more leads/sales for less money. The fact that some advertisers simply choose NOT to advertise on the Content Network because their results are not as profitable, is part of why the price is lower. But if they never tested DIFFERENT ads on the Content Network, they never actually found out if there is a real opportunity or not. (And again, for some products/services, the testing may confirm that the Content Network does not present an opportunity).

To establish the most fruitful pay-per-click ad testing, it is best to run such ad campaigns independent of each other: Conduct one series of tests on the search pages and another series of tests on the Content Network.

Depending upon the resources you have available to devote to testing, you might even test each area one-at-a-time, instead of concurrently, for the sake of simplicity.

Click here to view the current Introduction to Google Adwords series, and check back to see more as the series continues to expand.

Intro to AdWords (Part 2): Location Targeting

A fundamental point to understand about advertising your products or services via the Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) system is that you can target the geographic location of where your ads will display. Why pay for advertising in a location that does your business no good? Just as a real estate consultant in Chicago would not buy a Yellow Pages ad in Atlanta, any other local business professional would not need to pay for ads to appear in places where you do not service clients.

Target Your Ads For Your Business

If you are a regional consultant, contractor, restaurant owner or ANY local business who caters to a local market, it makes no sense to advertise all over the world, or even all over your own country, for that matter. Of course, even if you do sell a product that could be shipped anywhere in the world, you still might only advertise in English-speaking countries, until you could at least generate ads in the language pertinent to each country.

Furthermore, if you only ship products within one country or continent, it makes no sense to pay for advertising in places where you don’t ship.

This may seem obvious, but I have encountered business owners who have been discouraged by their advertising results on AdWords, only to learn that they were paying for a North American campaign when their service primarily catered to the northern part of Los Angeles County.

Types of Geographical Location Targeting

Some of the ways you can geographically target your Google AdWords PPC advertising is by selecting the country, state, region, city or zip code(s) that you want your ads to appear in. There are also customized geographical zones that you can select. For example, you could designate that your ads only display to searchers within a radius of a certain amount of miles around a point on a map (such as your business). Furthermore, you could exclude areas if you wanted. So, for example, if you market a product or service that is legally restricted in specific U.S. states (such as certain financial services), then you would target your ads in the United States and exclude the restricted states.

Conversely, even if you sell and deliver a product or service all over North America, you might still want to use location targeting as part of a testing process that might start in a smaller region before expanding to larger regions as your advertising is refined via testing, testing and more testing. Having said that, a more common way to test your initial ads is by controlling how much you spend per day for your AdWords advertising, which is a simple setting within your AdWords account.

OK, without belaboring this anymore, the point here is to take advantage of the geographical locations you can designate so that you are not paying for clicks that won’t turn into revenue for you.

Click here to view the current Introduction to Google Adwords series, and check back to see more as the series continues to expand.

Intro to AdWords (Part 1): Buying Traffic

AdWords is what makes Google rich. However, used effectively, AdWords, as an online pay per click advertising system, can generate leads and sales and in that way also make some business owners rich.

Conversely, you can also lose money through these little advertisements that are somewhat akin to online classified ads, which show up along search results (or within websites and blogs). In fact, it’s likely that when you start using AdWords to drive traffic to your website that you will lose money – at least in the beginning.

AdWords is Google’s main source of revenue, which is a testament to its popularity to advertisers around the world. And its popularity is a result of a profitable fact: It works.

And by “works,” what I mean is that you can readily drive traffic to your website. And you only need to pay for those visitors who click on an ad to arrive on your website.

Therein lies the simple elegance of AdWords: You pay for targeted traffic. Not only that, you choose the targeting of the ads by way of the selection of keywords.

If you are selling digital cameras, you can create ads that show up when web searchers enter the term “digital cameras” into Google’s search engine. If the ads are compelling enough, visitors will click on the ads and arrive on your site.

Furthermore, you can influence how high your ad is positioned on the search results page by bidding a higher amount to display your ad than your competitors. In reality, there is more to this than just how much you pay (such as how effective your ad and landing page are), but the bidding does serve as an important factor determining the position of your ad.

There is more to know about AdWords as an advertising media to drive traffic to your website.  This is the first part of what will be a several part series on using AdWords to successfully increase your online profits.

Click here to view the current Introduction to Google Adwords series, and check back to see more as the series continues to expand.

Internet Advertising Revenues (1st Half 2009)

With a notable recession in play, what are the numbers for internet advertising?  As reported via TechCrunch, U.S. Internet Ad Revenues Decline 5.3% In First Half 2009.

The source of the data is from a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, released today, which focuses on the first 6 months of 2009.

Here’s a couple takeaways from the report:

• Search revenue accounted for 47 percent of 2009 second-quarter revenues, up from the 44 percent reported in the second quarter of 2008. Display advertising, the second largest format, accounted for 35 percent, followed by classifieds (10 percent) and Lead Generation (7 percent) of 2009 second-quarter revenues.
• Search has remained the leading format since 2004, and has had strong sequential growth over this period. Search is followed by Display Banners and Classified/Directories in percentage share of Internet advertising.

Free Media Planning Tools

If you need to research niche sites for targeting media purchases, Harry Gold, at ClickZ, offers a post on Great Free Media Planning Tools.