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2008-04-01 01:36:50 -- If your company has made an investment in guaranteeing its first-page position on Google or Yahoo via pay-per-click advertising, is it worth the additional cost to have your site search engine-optimized?
Yes. Here are 5 reasons why.- Better Click-thru Results with SEO - Research shows that 70% of search engine click-thrus occur from the natural results. Pay-per-click provides instant positioning, but your click-thru rate on PPC ads will be much lower than what you’d achieve by being on the first page of search engine’s natural results.
- Better Customer Demographics – A recent study indicates that avid clickers of PPC ads tend to be younger in age and have less income. Depending on your business, your PPC ads may be generating a lot of impressions, but few quality clicks.
- Increased Credibility - Internet users consider the natural results to be more credible than PPC ads located on the same page, which explains the higher click-thru for natural results.
- High User Expectations - Search engine users clicking on your natural link enter your site with high expectations that your company provides what they’re looking for.
- Long-term Results - Your SEO efforts usually provide long-term return on investment. Once your site is positioned on the first page of the search engines, it’ll usually stay there for some time. Whereas with PPC, you’ll need to keep paying month after month to retain your ad position.
PPC can work well to augment an SEO campaign for keywords that are extremely competitive or to expand the number of keywords on which a site appears. Ideally, you'll recognize this as being more helpful from a branding standpoint than for lead generation.
For lead generation, make the investment in SEO.
About this Author
Angela Charles is president of Akron, Ohio,
SEO and web design firm Pilot Fish. Prior to life as an SEO copywriting expert, Angela was a business journalist, having worked for 10 years at Crain Communications. During her time there, she was a reporter for Tire Business and helped launch two Crain publications -- Plastics News and Waste News. She later joined
Polysort as its first editor, developing the company as a portal for the plastics and rubber industry. She later founded Pilot Fish, which is an operating company under Polysort.
