Profit Improving Online Strategies

Use Powerful Profit Improving Internet Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Online Business!

 

"A Website without Traffic
is like a shop with no customers!"

"Organic" Search produces better ROIs than Paid Traffic!

According to WebTrends 35% of marketers recently surveyed said that organic search optimization efforts led to higher ROI than paid search campaigns, as published in a new study by iProspect, a respected authority on search marketing and a WebTrends Insight Network partner.

Only 11% that said paid search produced better results with more than 80% of clicks on search engine results pages actually going to organic listings versus paid search ads, according to JupiterResearch.

Given that paid search marketing (for example, pay-per-click ads with Google and Yahoo!) has dominated the media spotlight during the last two years, the news of the value of organic search listings will come as a surprise to many.

Paid search marketing is now a $5 billion industry and represents 40% of all online advertising spend, according to Forrester Research.

Should you invest in pay-per-click search or search engine optimization? Search marketing experts like Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com, will tell you the answer for most organizations is both. And your own specific answer lies in measuring the return on investment of each activity and striking the appropriate balance between paid search and organic search engine optimization.

Choose according to your business situation!

1. Top Placement 'Guaranteed'

2. Immediate Traffic Results Needed

3. Ads / Content Change Frequently

4. Visitors Ad-Adverse

5. Ad Budget Limited

6. Website Layout Can't Be Changed

 

1. Top Placement 'Guaranteed'

If you want a 'guarantee' for a top placement and you intend to bid in a competitive market sector, you will most likely need to rely on advertising and leave free traffic to the side.

But remember, you should only use heavy advertising if you have the ad funds needed, you have done your research before and you test the performance of your ads consistently. Otherwise you might drain your funds too quickly before you get to the stage were you can reinvest (a part of) the proceeds of your advertising campaign.

Calculate the ROI for your PPC campaign and decide whether you want to bid for the most competitive keywords. Ask yourself that if your keywords are in a rather crowded area, how likely it will be that the targeted visitors you want, will find your ads?

As an alternative you could do some keyword research for secondary keywords, that are less obvious and have less competition. You could advertise across a larger number of less popular keyword search words and with getting your ads text right, you could get a higher number of click-throughs to your site.

2. Immediate Traffic Results Needed

If you need immediate results and you don't want to wait for free traffic building up over time than paid traffic via PPC is the way for you to go.

With a pay-per-click campaign you can achieve traffic numbers in a matter of hours and your traffic might be more targeted (depending on your ad text) than visitors coming from search engines. Pay-per-click advertising will obviously cost you money, by choosing the right keywords but once you which keywords you want to bid on a PPC campaign can be very effective.

If you track your ad campaigns (and only if you do, should you be using PPC), you will be able to tell quickly how your campaigns are doing. Keep the winners, change the wording of your ads to improve your click-through ad conversion rate and your ROI should be on the up.

3. Ads / Content Change Frequently

If you intend to frequently change the wording of your ad and/or your website content, to respond to recent events or advertise seasonal offers.

And you might want to switch advertising on and off, your choice will be to use more PPC advertising since it offers you more flexibility.

4. Visitors Ad-Adverse

The credibility associated with high search engine rankings supports favourable conversion rates from free traffic but certain Internet users dislike PPC advertising no matter how well done. If you feel that your audience / target market is of that kind,

your money on ads will be wasted maybe even counter-productive.

 

5. Ad Budget Limited

As long as you want to keep your advertising budget to a limit or you don't have one, then your choice will be to implement search engine optimization techniques most effectively.

If you don't intend to pay for visitors to your site, even when considering the life-time value of a customer, your traffic will come through online search techniques, and free advertising techniques that you can use offline.

 

6. Website Layout Can't Be Changed

To achieve the best free traffic numbers through SEO you might have to change some parts of your site's layout. The reason for this is that search engines "don't like" the heavy use of certain common website design elements like:

These elements usually make the sites less readable for the search engine spiders and thus the search results might not be optimal for your site, if your site uses these elements heavily.

However if you feel that you need to provide a certain multi-media experience for your visitors relying heavily on the use of theses techniques, than you might have to concentrate on getting your visitors through paid traffic.

Website Landing Pages For Search Engine Optimization Or Pay-Per-Click Advertising Campaigns

If you want to benefit from both ‘free’ and ‘paid’ traffic, you need to be aware that website landing pages serve somewhat different causes and that there are differences between landing pages designed for pay-per-click campaigns and landing pages designed for search engine optimization (organic SEO).

If you are building landing pages for organic SEO you want to make sure that you build them primarily for the user of your site. With organic optimization, all the pages have to fit within your site's structure. They can't be something that you're making exclusively as spider food for the search engines because that moves into the dangerous area, particularly if that page can't be found by other means as you navigate through your site.

The questions is should you ever use the same landing pages for organic and pay-per-click? You can possibly use the same pages for paid and free traffic, but often the strategies that you would want to test in a paid environment would be very different from the kinds of things that you'd want to test in an organic/free environment.

For example, for paid traffic, you could use a much more graphically rich page using Flash and less copy but this is not something you should do for free traffic. In a free traffic environment, you'd want to have a good amount of content that provides value for the visitor and explains it's use in words.

You can use Flash but you certainly wouldn't want to embed content in the Flash that the search engine spiders wouldn't see. So there are a lot of practical differences between landing pages designed for organic and pages designed for paid and you need to keep this in mind when designing your pages.

 

Four scenarios to decide whether you want to use free or paid traffic

The following 4 scenarios might help you to decide for your purposes whether you want to use only free traffic or paid traffic
or to come up with a strategy how to combine these two techniques:

Scenarios of SEO and PPC use

1. Small Advertising Budget, Can Wait For Results

2. Small Ad Budget, Immediate & Long-Term Results Needed

3. O.K. Ad Budget, Immediate Results Needed, Optimization Questions

4. Limitless Ad Budget, Maximum Results Needed

 

 

1. Small Advertising Budget, Can Wait For Results

With a small advertising budget, you need to be prepared to build your traffic over time rather than over night. Start with in-depth search engine optimization (SEO) for some very important search phrases.

When traffic has built up and you know from your tests and traffic analysis which keywords show the best results, then if needed you might start some supporting pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns for those high value keywords.

 

2. Small Ad Budget, Immediate & Long-Term Results Needed

When you work with a limited advertising budget but need immediate and long-term results, you could start with search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) at the same time, by spending more on PPC until your traffic improves.

Then you may reduce your advertising expenses in less critical areas, where you've achieved a high PageRank through SEO.

 

3. O.K. Ad Budget, Immediate Results Needed, Optimization Questions

With a considerable advertising budget you want to achieve immediate results and would like to make best use of your budget. Find out the keywords and search phrases that deliver the best results by analysing your traffic, improving your landing pages, and increasing your conversion rates by testing.

With these results start a search engine project targeted to your items with the best ROI and keep testing.

 

4. Limitless Ad Budget, Maximum Results Needed

With almost no limits to your advertising budget, you want maximum results from your campaigns. In this case use search engine optimization and pay-per-click simultaneously to maximum effects.

Evaluate the value of conversions on your site and calculate the hard and soft cost of both approaches.

Keep testing ongoing to improve results further.

 

Combination is the key

According to HighRankings today most people involved in Internet marketing understand that it is not a question of either search engine optimization for free traffic or pay-per-click campaigns for paid traffic but a combination of both strategies adjusted to your needs.

Companies with smaller advertising budgets usually start with building traffic through search engine optimization. By testing their keywords and landing pages they can tell which ones are most valuable to them thus concentrating their pay-per-click advertising on the key driving factors.

Home   |   FAQ   |   Testimonials   |   AUP   |    Anti Spam Policy   |    Privacy Policy   |    Site Map