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Pay Per Click Versus Orgainic Search Engine Listings

By Graham Baylis

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 21May2009
Word count: 936
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The fable of the hare and tortoise's race is known by most people, both young and old., but it has parallels in the world of Internet Marketing, specifically in the area of Search Engine Marketing (SEM and SEO).

Search Engine Marketing covers the many ways by which a website can be made more visible and thus get more traffic, these being centered on making sure that a site is listed when people search for a particular phrase. This of course covers the area of 'Pay Per Click' (PPC) and that of 'Organic' or 'Merit' listings, all the visits in the former being paid for , whilst those generated from the later are free.

It is PPC that makes Google all of its money, and is an method used by many website owners today to ensure that their site is visible and thus gets visited.

What is this to do with tortoises and hares then??

The relationship is quite simple really, PPC is very much a 'hare' (gets a website on the front page very very fast, sometimes within hours) while Organic listings can take a long time (sometimes months), and are thus very much 'tortoise like'.

In this little story we take the analogy even further, but first, let us select the rules for the race. In the original fable, it was just a straight run to the finishing post, but in the world of Search Engine Marketing it is slightly different, the race not being one to get a website's listing on the front page of Google (such a race will always be won by the PPC hare), but instead to the finishing point that marks a successful Return on Investment?.

Why is this true, quite simply because being first in the listings using PPC is not always the right answer, as you will see as this story unfolds.

So to the Race !!

Picture if you can the starting line, there is the hare with a huge sack load of money, money that he intends to give to anyone who will visit the site while on the run to that finishing post. The poor old tortoise has only got his soap box, knowing that he will have to do a lot of talking to people, asking them to support his site (by links) and by convincing them that the site is worth visiting in the first place.

Worse still for the tortoise, he cannot take the shortest path to the finishing line, as he will have to go out of his way to visit as many other people (sites) as possible in his quest for support. Plus to make matters even worse, he knows that even when he does get 'support' for this site, it will take the umpires (in this case the Search Engines) quite a time before they will even 'notice' this support, this making his climb to the front page of the listings and his goal of getting a good ROI on his labours even longer.

It is no surprise therefore that when the hare races off, the visits to his site pour in just as fast as he can throw the money out to people, but wait, is this really the idea, the way to success? Surely you have to make sure that the right person is being given the money and visiting the site? Asking these questions (in the SEM world this in part equates to choosing the right key phrases and writing the right adverts) slows the hare down a bit, but he is not worried as he knows that the tortoise is going to have the same sort of problems.

The tortoise's journey is, as you can see much slower, he has a longer path to take and do a lot of work to get people to notice him and his requests for support, he even has to make sure that the words (key phrases) he uses (in the SEM world this equates to those on each of his web pages) are used in the just the right way, as otherwise he knows that the umpires will disallow his gains (he could be accused of cheating or 'spamming' in SEO terms).

As you can see, with all this work to do, it takes a long time before the pages that the tortoise is trying to promote to get onto the front page of Google, whilst the hare has had his pages listed on the front page ever since the race started, but he has gone through a lot of money 'buying in' those visits and it took longer to get to the end than he thought it would too.

So who was the Winner?

Unlike the fable, in the SEM world, the winner is not so certain, PPC can work very well indeed (when managed properly). But however successful the PPC campaign is, it will in virtually all cases not be as good at converting visitors to buyers as a well constructed Organic campaign. So while there may be lots of visits to a site using PPC, they may well end up like the hare, i.e., a bit short of cash!

The morale of the story?

By all means, do use the 'hare' (PPC) approach, but be aware of the dangers of PPC, always remember that those that click on PPC ads do not seem to be so committed to purchase or enquire as those who click on any organic listings. So go for PPC by all means, but don?t please don?t forget the good old tortoise, after all he did win in the original race?

Graham Baylis works for a business called Serendipity Online Marketing, whose sole aim is to help businesses use the power that the Internet offers. This article is one of his many offerings and tries to help people understand just how Google thinks. For more articles about Search Engine Optimisation see www.serendipity-online-marketing.co.uk

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