This morning, one of my “Free Websites Secrets” subscribers asked me about the advantages of doing SEO work on and off his site vs. the PPC advertising he’s currently doing.
PPC – PayPerClick – is also referred to as Sponsored Advertising in the search engines. Any time you search for something in Google, Yahoo or Bing, you’ll see that Sponsored Advertising usually sits at the top and runs along the right-hand column of the page in a colored box.
These PPC advertisers are creating their own ads and using them in automated rotation. Every time a prospect clicks a specific ad, the engine (Google for instance) deducts a few cents from that advertiser’s pre-set budget. Most clicks might cost 5 – 10 cents based on the keyword the advertiser is using in that ad, but some clicks in more competitive spaces might cost $2 or $3 based on the keyword.
In our website marketing strategy at Armitage, Inc., we like to use PPC for brand new sites, especially if they need to get up and rocking for a specific purpose quickly. While we immediately start SEO action as well, it takes longer for a site to organically crawl its way over millions of competitors to Page One visibility, whereas PPC can have a brand new site up in advertising rotation and visibility in just a matter of hours. We, however, never use PPC for more than a month or two – it’s too expensive an endeavor when it produces no long-term traction for our clients.
The problem with PPC, as I explained to my dear reader, is this:
PPC will keep you visible as an advertiser as long as you’re advertising. Once your budget is depleted for that week or month, the engine (i.e., Google) just drops you like a rock, back to the original depths from which you came.
SEO Off Page work is money much better spent. Yes, it takes anywhere from 3-8 months to see your site crawl up through the mire of millions of sites to settle in on Page One, but you STAY positioned well once you’re there. (Well, there’s a little jostling, depending on how competitive your neighbors are, but you’re never going to drop to Page 78 again (let alone Page 7).
From that point, you can either choose to maintain or increase your budget to hit #1 placement above some very serious competitors of yours, or lessen your budget to secure your positioning and expand out on a broader keyword base.
It doesn’t make sense to do SEO OFF Page, though, without SEO ON Page work done first. This, of course, is just a one-time fix that might involve some content tweaking based on our SEO research and the keywords you really want to target. The primary work, though, involves the rather meticulous writing of all the meta tags, URLs and page titles for your “money pages” – the pages you really want to drive your audience to.
Once that’s done, the SEO Off Page picks up the baton and runs for the finish line, tying your site into much greater traffic and high-level visibility in the search engines using those same keywords.
Armitage, Inc. has created substantial – often very phenomenal – results in our SEO On Page and SEO Off Page efforts. We’ll be happy to review your site for SEO On page and SEO Off page needs. Just Contact Us or call directly at (949) 637-1995 (PST).