There are so many ways to increase outreach and encourage conversions online, but two of the best options to explore are search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising. Both are complex undertakings that require ongoing effort and education, although you can hire experts to help you with both.
What you need to know is that your time, effort, and expense will be repaid with desired conversions, from targeted traffic to sales, and everything in between. In short, you need to know what SEO and PPC can do for your business. Here are a few things to consider.
Benefits of SEO
SEO used to be a bit like the wild west, with businesses utilizing all kinds of shady tactics to draw traffic to their websites. While black hat activities like keyword stuffing and link building schemes earned high rankings on search engines and encouraged click-through, they didn’t really help businesses connect with targeted customers.
Instead, they raised the ire of consumers who couldn’t find what they were searching for, as well as search engines like Google that were unable to deliver relevant results to their users. As a result, Google worked tirelessly to create algorithms that favored white hat SEO, rewarded relevant, timely, and valuable content, and punished black hat practices by de-listing offending websites. Where does that leave us today?
It’s harder to create immediate results with SEO, but with ongoing effort you can maintain high rankings for targeted searches, gain the trust of users, and if you know what you’re doing, conduct your SEO strategies with little expense. The main caveat is that it could take months of sustained effort before you begin to see any kind of payoff.
Benefits of PPC
The biggest draw of PPC advertising is its potential to deliver speedy results. When you pay for advertising with Google, you have the opportunity to deliver content above the fold, so to speak, where it will get seen before content ranked purely through organic efforts.
This type of attention-grabbing promotion is designed to cater to search users seeking instant gratification. Those who perform searches generally gravitate toward the results that populate at the top of the list. If your ad is in the top 2-3 results, your chances of gaining click-through are exponentially higher than if you rank further down the list. If you don’t make the top ten, chances are you’ll never get seen – very few people ever bother to look at the second or successive pages of search results.
Of course, this is a privilege you’ll have to pay for, which means you need a dedicated budget for PPC advertising. What you’ll get for your money is top placement for relevant searches, with guaranteed positioning that isn’t affected by the algorithms that govern organic rankings.
Plus, there are tools and settings that allow you to target specific groups, particularly those that are most likely to have an interest in whatever you’re selling. It’s said that one targeted visitor is worth a hundred that accidentally click-through to your website, so whether you’re engaging in SEO, PPC, or both, you have the opportunity to increase the conversions that are most likely to pay off.
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