SEO vs. PPC
When you do a search on a keyword, you will see two sets of results - the organic search results and the paid search results, also known as sponsored links and pay-per-click listings.
As you will notice from the image, the listings at the very top and on the right side of the page are the paid search results which are denoted by "sponsored links" (circled).
So what are the differences between organic search results and paid search results?
The biggest difference is how top rankings are achieved in both sets of results. Let's look at organic search first. In the organic search results, top rankings are achieved by optimizing your website for keywords you are interested in ranking for. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The search engines send a bot to your site which crawls your pages, indexes them in a database and uses an algorithm to score the pages based on keyword specific criteria. The more relevant your site is for a keyword, the higher you will rank in the organic search results for that keyword.
However, there is no guarantee that you will ever rank for any keyword at all, and it is especially difficult to rank on the first page of results. There are, after all, millions of webpages on the internet, and search engines also consider other external factors that we have little control over such as number of links to your website, the quality of those links and website authority. Also, even if your website is deemed relevant for certain keywords, there is no guarantee when you will show up in the organic search results for those keywords.
When your ad does show up in the organic search results, we have little control over what the ad says since search engines usually pull a snippet from your webpage to use as the description. Also, there are a limited number of keywords for which you will be able to achieve top organic search rankings. However, the great thing about organic search is that search engines do not charge for the traffic they send to your website from these listings. And even though there is an investment in time and money to keep your website optimized in order to stay relevant for your keywords, this cost is generally minimal considering the number of "free" leads you will receive to your website.
In the paid search results, top rankings are achieved based on the performance of your ads and the amount you are willing to pay for each click, much like an auction where each advertiser is bidding for the first position (which receives the most traffic). But, the winner is also chosen based on relevance factors such as how many people click on your ads versus your competitors, if you are a trusted advertiser or a new advertiser with little history, landing page quality and other factors. Spectrum knows what it takes to give you the edge over your competitors.
Many companies underestimate the potential of pay-per-click or simply do not want to make the investment. However, in addition to being an extremely profitable online marketing channel, paid search listings have many advantages over organic search listings. For example, there is no waiting game in paid search. When you want your ad to show for a keyword or a set of keywords, it will show within a few minutes - not days, weeks or months as can be the case with organic search. Also, you have complete control over your ad. The text is not pulled from your landing page, it is written by you. Instead of search engines trying to guess which of your landing pages to send visitors to, you can specify exactly which landing page on your website each visitor should be sent to for each of the keywords on which you are bidding.
You can achieve top rankings with much less effort, and the top paid search listings actually show up higher on the page than the top organic search listings. There is no limit to the number of keywords you can bid on. Pay-per-click accounts with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of keywords are typical. Also, paid search gives you access to powerful features that are not available through organic search, such as geo-targeting options, display advertising and keyword insertion.
Lastly, the wealth of traffic and data that is available in paid search makes it a great resource for conducting tests to strengthen the performance of your website, which is important to consider since you might have multiple marketing channels that utilize your website besides paid search. Banner ads, affiliate programs, email campaigns, comparison shopping engines and even your organic search channel will benefit from tests conducted through paid search. Spectrum's web analytics, conversion tracking and bid management software allows us to take advantage of everything that paid search has to offer. Contact us today if you are ready to take your website to the next level.
