Small Business Marketing: Pay-Per-Click or SEO?

When it comes to boosting traffic to your website, you have two basic options: pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or search engine optimization (SEO). You can pay for traffic using the PPC advertising programs provided by Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and others.

A common question that every small business owner has when it comes to driving visitors to his or her website is whether search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is the best option. These are the two most effective traffic sources and each has pro's and con's to consider.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC):

 

PPC advertising, also known as “Paid Search” or “Search Engine Marketing (SEM)”, is the process of paying for advertising on sites and search engines but the advertiser is not charged unless someone clicks on an ad. Most often (but not always) PPC is an auction where you compete for position against other advertisers.

PPC can allow for much quicker wins in visibility or conversions for advertisers whereas SEO is a long term effort of building a community to help your organic presence. While it can take a long time to rank #1 organically on search engine results pages via SEO, advertisers can use PPC ads to appear above organic or SEO results, seen in red in the image above, within minutes of opening an advertising account.

Advertisers select keywords to bid on, which match to the search queries, or actual words users are searching for. Similar to SEO, content (in ads) and relevancy are significant factors in getting ads to show in the top position. Search engines like Google give each ad a quality score (1-10 basis) based off of numerous factors which they unfortunately won’t elaborate much on. That quality score is then multiplied by your bid to get an overall Ad Rank.  In an auction setting like Google’s, an advertiser only ends up paying just a bit more than the one below them, after all Ad Ranks are evaluated. So the amount an advertiser bids is not necessarily what’s charged upon a click.

Pay-Per-Click Pro's

• Instant traffic to your website -- pay-per-click gives you the ability to have ads on the top of search results almost immediately after setting up a PPC campaign.

• Full control -- you are in complete control of your ad copy, the keywords that will trigger your ad and the destination URL that the visitor is sent to after they click on your ad.

• No worrying about algorithm updates -- PPC ads are not impacted like the organic (unpaid) search results are when search engines perform an algorithm update.

• Complete brand dominance -- Paid search marketing lets you control prime real estate in the search results when your brand shows up in both the natural results and the paid search results.

• Laser target your audience -- you can target your ideal customers by controlling what geographical locations will see your ads, allowing small businesses to only target potential local customers.

Pay-Per-Click Con's

• Can be very expensive -- pay-per-click can be very expensive if the campaign is not correctly set up, resulting in a depleted budget with little to nothing to show from it.

• Must test extensively -- PPC takes a lot of personal experience and ongoing testing, which is the reason many small businesses hire digital marketing firms to handle their PPC management.

• Must optimize constantly -- Paid search marketing is not a "set it and forget it" advertising option, as PPC campaigns require constant optimization and fine tuning in order to keep the ads performing and producing a ROI.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

 

SEO is about getting a website found and ranking high on search engine results pages. It is also often referred to as organic or natural search results, highlighted in blue above. When a searcher decides to click on these results there is no fee charged to that website.

The hard part is optimizing a site so that the search engines recognize it as highly qualified and relevant to the search query. This process can take time, and there’s no concrete answer for how to rank #1. While clicks on these links may be free, it can take an investment of time and money from a business to make the right optimizations to their site to produce the desired results.

It’s also important to remember that search engines are not real-time rankings; they’re an index of sites the engines have visited over time and they may only visit some sites every few days. A SEO manager’s job is to understand what these search engines deem relevant and high quality in order to make savvy and efficient decisions which will increase natural rankings when a site is surveyed or crawled. In order for a website to rank higher, there are two main factors search engines consider: On-Page and Off-Page factors.

On-Page factors include everything on your website that help search engines find it. Among many other factors, these elements include:

• Keywords that are relevant to the things people are searching for.
• The site’s architecture.  For example: load time, internal linking structure, title tags, search friendly URLs, and others.
• Content on the pages relevant to the products and users.  Content is KING!

Off-Page factors focuses on getting other sites to include a link/reference back to your website. This is seen as a vote of confidence in the eyes of the engines. Known as “Link Building” for SEOs, this process is best managed by building relationships and generating quality links vs. spamming links across the web. A few strategies for building links can be through guest blogging, sponsorships, discounts, infographics, building a resource or an asset.

Search Engine Optimization Pro's

• Natural exposure and credibility -- holding a top organic (unpaid) search result not only provides a lot of exposure but many consumers view organic search results as being more credible because they are not paid ads.

• Large ROI potential -- the organic search results will typically attract more clicks which bring in more conversions and revenue, and ultimately a solid ROI. 

• Exposure on several search engines -- high quality search engine optimization can provide your small business with exposure on several search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Bing.

Search Engine Optimization Con's

• Quality SEO takes time -- SEO can take many months to notice results, but when it is done the right way it can result in consistent website traffic and a nice ROI.

• High competition -- some business categories and keywords have very high competition and your small business might be trying to fight an uphill battle against corporations with huge budgets and resources. No business owner starts a search engine optimization campaign or hires a SEO company with the intention of going after page #2 -- everyone wants first page rankings and ultimately the top spot.

• Susceptible to algorithm updates -- an algorithm can really shuffle the search results, causing organic rankings to fall and months of hard work and money to be flushed down the drain -- this is why it is so important to use a SEO company that uses content marketing and social engagement rather than mass link building strategies. 

Final Thoughts

While pay-per-click marketing can produce immediate results you must be willing to spend the money, but it allows you to dominate the top paid search results. Search engine optimization can deliver a solid return in the long run and while it takes time to do it correctly you do not want to take any shortcuts that put your website in danger of a penalty.

Still wondering whether search engine optimization or pay-per-click is the right choice for your small business? Using a combination works really well, although it really comes down to your available budget and goals. 

Top On Page Optimization Techniques

On page SEO is perhaps the most important process not only for better rankings but also for a successful internet marketing campaign. Every campaign starts from the web site and if your web site is not optimized for both search engines and users, your chances for success are minimized.

In today’s post we will be looking specifically at On-Page SEO and some of the most effective ways to increase your page rankings on search engines.

On-Page Search Engine Optimisation

Page Titles

Your page titles are one of the most important SEO factors on your site. Each of your pages & posts should have its own unique title, which includes the main keywords for that page.

For example, you could write a blog post about a new chocolate cake recipe that you have tried. It is therefore vitally important that you include ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ within your post title, perhaps “Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe” or “ Chocolate Cake Recipe for kids”, etc.

This way, whenever someone searches for Chocolate Cake Recipes in a search engine, your post has a better chance of showing up because you have included those keywords.

Meta Descriptions

Many people forget to include meta descriptions for their pages. These descriptions are an important place to include relevant keywords for your content, as these are used within the search results when your page is listed.

For instance, if we continue to use the ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ example, then a good meta description for that page would include those keywords and related ones. So, “This easy chocolate cake recipe is possibly the most delicious, mouth watering, chocolatey cake ever made.” would be a great meta description to use, as it is relatively short, whilst containing a number of specific keywords.

Meta Tags

For each of your pages, you can include a set of keywords in the form of meta tags. These should be all the relevant keywords of your content, which you will have researched previously.

I use a WordPress plug-in on my sites called ‘All In One SEO Pack’. This allows me to enter all of my meta tag keywords, meta description and page title at the bottom of each of my posts before publishing. This simply inserts all of the information into your page HTML format for you, making your life a little easier.

URL Structure

Including search engine friendly URLs for each of your pages is highly recommended, as these bring better crawling. Shorter URLs seem to perform better in search engine results, however that is not the only factor.

URLs that include targeted keywords, also perform better. The location of these keywords can also be a major influence. For example site.com/keyword would perform better than site.com/365/738/subfolder/keyword etc.

Body Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)

When writing your articles, you should break up your content into smaller sections & paragraphs to make it easier for people to read. These sections can be given heading, which is where H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. tags are used.

Generally H1 tags are reserved for your main page title, with subsequent headings being issued H2, H3, etc. Search engines use these to determine what is important within your content. This is why keyword rich headines are more useful than generic ones. Make sure you write keyword rich headings in the order of priority in H1, H2 and H3 title tags. They are used by many crawlers to differentiate important content.

Keyword Density

Including relevant keywords throughout your content is very important, as it helps search engines work out what your content is about. However, try not to excessively repeat and over use keywords just for search engine robots. This can lead to your site being banned from search engines.

To avoid this, try to keep your keyword density to roughly 2-5%. If you find this hard, get out a thesaurus and broaden your writing vocabulary. This way, you are still writing about the same thing, without risk of being banned.

Image SEO

Using images within your content is a great way to make your site more visually appealing and break up boring chunks of text. You can utilise these images to help improve your site SEO.

All your uploaded images have titles, so treat them just the same as your page titles. Including relevant keywords can help people find your site when searching on Google Images.

You can also include Alt Text and Descriptions for your images, making them even more useful with SEO.

Internal Linking

People often think that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links are important, these are not the only important links!

Placing links to your other website pages, is a great way of improving your site and used properly, internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal. Not only does it make it much easier for your visitors to navigate around your site and find all of your content, but it also ensures that your site gets properly crawled allowing the search engines to find all of your pages. It also helps to build the relevancy of a page to relevant keywords and phrases, whilst also helping to increase the Google PageRank of your pages.

There are a number of different methods that you can use to improve your internal linking structure. The main being; content links and permanent navigation links.

For bloggers, content links are very useful when used properly. These are links that are placed within your article posts, which redirect people to other relevant pages on your site.

Quality Content Is King

As we all know “Content is King” in the SEO industry, so we can’t ignore this one. Each page should have a minimum of 500 words of great quality content.

Navigation

Make sure your navigation is crawlable, whether it be text or image based.

JavaScript/CSS External

Externalize the JS and CSS codes to make your website pages load faster. Take this with a grain of salt as it’s not always the best choice in any case. Sometimes it’s better to use pregressively inline JS and CSS for faster rendering and perceived time.

External pages

Adding links to external high quality website (not just popular) resources builds a good relation in the eye of search engines and this trust will help the websites to get higher positions on search engines.

Geo-tagging

Use geo-tagging to let your users and search engines see your actual business location.

Authorship Markups

Use authorship to take the ownership of the content you publish on your website.

Sociability

Add social media buttons to encourage your readers to share your website’s content on their profiles. Websites with social signals can get better rankings in search engines.

XML SiteMap

Create xml sitemap and add each of your website in it. You can submit to sitemap in Google and Bing webmaster tools to make your website index soon.

Robots.txt

Updated: The robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl and index pages on their website.

Analytics

Make sure you have added and setup the analytics code so you can properly analyze your website.

Webmaster Tools

Add and verify the ownership of your websites via Google Webmaster Tools. These webmaster tools will also help to analyze the on-page validations.

Hosting

A website hosting server should be up and running 24/7, with at least 99.9% uptime. A website with too much downtime can be de-indexed from and won’t be able to rank higher on search engines.

Summary

These techniques are just some of the ways that you can improve your on-page SEO. Any one used independently of the others won’t make much difference to your site ranking, however when used together, they can help to improve your site traffic.

They will help to get your pages working better, they will help to get your entire site crawled by search engine spiders, they will help increase the value of internal pages and they will build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases.

So, it pays to spend some time implementing these to improve your site! 

What are On Page SEO and Off Page SEO?

Search engine optimization is the term used to describe a set of processes that aim in optimizing a website for search engines. SEO is important not only for getting high quality visitors but it is also a way to increase the credibility of a website and to expand brand awareness.

Search engines are using complex algorithms to determine which pages to include in their index and the order they show these pages in the search results. SEO is the way to ‘speak’ to search engines in a language they can understand and provide them with more details about a website.

SEO has two major components, On Page and off page SEO.

On Page SEO: -

On Page SEO refers to settings you can apply on the website so that it is optimized for search engines. The most important on Page SEO Tips are:

• Optimized titles and descriptions
• Proper URL Structures
• User friendly navigation (user sitemaps)
• Optimized internal links
• Text formatting (use of h1, h2, bold etc)
•  Image optimization (image size, proper image names, use of ALT tag)
•  User friendly 404 pages
•  Fast loading pages
•  Google Authorship verification for all pages
•  Top quality fresh content (This is always the most important SEO factor!)
•  External links (no broken links or links to ‘bad’ sites)

Off Page SEO

Unlike On- page SEO, off-page SEO refers to activities outside the boundaries of the webpage. The most important are:

•         Link Building
•         Social Media
•         Social bookmarking

Why is Off-Page SEO important?

Search engines have been trying for decades to find a way to return the best results to the searcher. To do that, they take into account the on-site SEO factors (described above), some other quality factors and off-page SEO.

Off page SEO gives them a very good indication on how the World (other websites and users) perceive the particular website. A web site that is useful is more likely to have references (links) from other websites; it is more likely to have mentions on social media (Facebook likes, tweets, Pins, +1’s etc.) and it is more likely to be bookmarked and shared among communities of like-minded users.

What are the benefits of ‘off-site SEO’ to website owners?

A successful off-site SEO strategy will generate the following benefits to website owners:

Increase in rankings – The website will rank higher in the SERPs and this also means more traffic.

Increase in PageRank – Page rank is a number between 0 and 10 which indicates the importance of a website in the eyes of Google. It is the system invented by Larry Page (one of Google’s founders) and one of the reasons that Google was so successful in showing the most relevant results to the searcher.  Page rank today is only one out of the 250 factors that Google is using to rank websites.

More exposure – Higher rankings also means greater exposure because when a website ranks in the top positions: it gets more links, more visits and more social media mentions. It’s like a never ending sequence of events where one thing leads to another and then to another etc.

Link Building

Link building is the most popular off-Page SEO method.  Basically by building external links to your website, you are trying to gather as many ‘votes’ as you can so that you can bypass your competitors and rank higher. For example if someone likes this article and references it from his/her website or blog, then this is like telling search engines that this page has good information.

Over the years webmasters were trying to build links to their websites so that they rank higher and they ‘invented’ a number of ways to increase link count. The most popular ways were: -

Blog Directories – something like yellow pages but each entry was a link back to a website.

Forum Signatures – Many people where commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their website (they included the links in their signature).

Article Directories – By publishing your articles on an article directory you could get a link (or 2) back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already published articles.

Shared Content Directories – Websites like hubpages and infobarrel allowed you to publish content and in return you could add a couple of links pointing to your websites.

Link exchange schemes – Instead of trying to publish content you could get in touch with other webmasters and exchange links. In other words I could link your website from mine and you could do the same. In some cases you could even do more complicated exchanges by doing a 3-way link, in other words I link to your website from my website but you link to my website from a different website.

SocialMedia

Social media is part of ‘off-site SEO’ and if you think about it, it’s also a form of link building. It should be noted that almost all of the links you get from social media sites are “nofollow” but this does not mean that they do not have any value.

Social Media mentions are gaining ground as ranking factors and proper configuration of social media profilescan also boost SEO.

SocialBookmarking

Social bookmarking is not as popular as it used to be in the past but it is still a good way to get traffic to your website. 

Conclusion

Off-page SEO is as important as on-site SEO. If you want your SEO campaigns to be successful you have to do both. When thinking about link building doesn’t take the easy way, but try to get links from hard-to-get places. The more difficult is to get a link, the more value it has.

In the past you could easily get thousands of links and rank higher but nowadays you have to do more than that.  My advice is to forget about link building all together and put all your efforts in making a great website, promote it correctly and everything else will follow.