By Robert Lockard
Optimizing your website’s content for search engines costs about half as much as relying solely on a paid-search campaign for getting customers to your site. So says a recent study by Frommer’s Unlimited I read about in the Travolution article, “WTM: Rich content ‘more cost-effective than PPC’.”
Of course, the main flaw I saw in this study is that it analyzes SEO and PPC results separately when many ecommerce companies use a combination of the two. SEO and PPC have different strengths and weaknesses. SEO is slower but more cost-efficient while PPC is fast, but each click costs money.
It’s essential for a website’s long-term future for it to have strong content that is designed to attract search engines’ attention and increase its ranking in their search results. But that doesn’t mean PPC is irrelevant or too expensive for companies to take advantage of in their Internet-marketing campaigns.
According to Frommer’s study, it costs about 17 cents per visitor to optimize a site’s content. On the other hand, it costs about 33 cents per visitor through PPC ads.
The company based its findings on the results of eight companies focusing on travel, hotels or airlines. They divided the total cost of an SEO package by the total number of visitors who clicked on the sites’ natural search results to get the cost per SEO visitor. They divided the total amount paid for a PPC campaign by the number of visitors who clicked on PPC ads to get that average cost.
They found that 70 percent of their site visitors clicked on an organic search result, not a paid-search ad. Thirty percent isn’t bad, though.
What are your thoughts on this paid-search vs. search engine optimization debate? Which works best for you, or do they both work well together?
This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Is SEO a better deal than PPC?” The photo of the SEO, PPC Scrabble game is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of therichbrooks.
By Britnee Nguyen
SEO… It’s been around since the creation of the internet, but hasn’t really become a focus of companies to use until five years ago. Search engine optimization has successfully helped hundreds of companies reach high on search engine lists to get noticed more by on-line users.
Different strategies are used such as including keywords in page headers, titles, hyperlinks, navigation bar, ALT description and META tags. Another important valuable tactic is to use unique content writing. The actual content with keywords inserted that are posted on websites can help increase traffic flow and improve sales. Because not only does it provide an avenue to display keywords, but those who visit the website will notice the quality of it too.
There are a few things you should look for when writing SEO-quality content. First, make sure your content is not duplicated or copied from somewhere else. This includes even just a sentence or phrase; it could affect your rankings. Original content is the best way to go to and preferably by a real human being – not a robot.
If you have a robot or foreigners write your content, it most likely won’t have completely correct grammar and good word usage. Hiring a person with a background in writing, English, or journalism will give you better assurance that they will do a good job and write content that will draw viewers in. For example, Submit Solution has a content team that was specifically hired to write quality content for their websites. If they had outsourced, they might not be guaranteed they will get what they are looking for.
One last thing – when writing, be sure to keep in mind who your audience is. If you write very informal on a medical website, then viewers will not be impressed and not think it’s professional and won’t purchase services. If you wrote the content in a formal voice for the medical site, then it will fit better for the company and its customers. So not only should you write SEO content just for search engines, but you should cater it to your readers as well.
Flickr Photo Credit: Linda Cronin