Organic results or paid placement?
April 10, 2008 by adpuma
Your website can appear in search results in two places: organic results and sponsored links. Both can be improved with well-applied effort or well-allocated money. How do you choose between them?
Search engine optimization specialists (SEO) will tell you that organic results are, well, organic. They reflect your actual content as well as reputation (isn’t it cool, things like karma, reputation and love expressed quantitatively?), they improve with time, and they are hard to mess with.
Advertising yourself in pay per click (PPC) campaign has its advantages, too.
- Ad campaign starts to work immediately. Search engine optimization takes much longer to bring useful results, it is more expensive in the short run (short as in years) and gets you only so far.
- People who click only on organic links are harder to convert. In short, they don’t shop, they research. This may change as more and more prospect customers become technically sophisticated, but so far, unless your product is a computer professional tool or a geeky toy, straightforward ads may be more useful in terms of getting real paying customers. On the other hand, organic visitors are free.
Ideally, you should do both SEO and PPC.
- Your ads compete against other ads on max bid and quality score. Higher PageRank and relevance of your site means higher ad quality score means lower CPCs for same positions (or higher positions for same CPCs).
- It is impossible to optimize a website for every relevant keyword without compromising the content meant for human reading. In the end, you don’t write for the search spiders nor sell to them.
- If you are big and lucky, your ads on top of the search results page AND your organic results on top of the organic list together will drive competitors down the page.
