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Alesco Marketing
Doug Williams

PPC is Quicker, but Organic Traffic is Better

Pay per Click can give you almost instant traffic, but studies show that organic traffic gets more attention and converts better. When doing search, most people look at the top organic results first. The top three organic results receive the most visitor traffic for each targeted keyword search.

Pay per Click: Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) can supply almost instant traffic to your website. All three major search engines offer PPC Advertising. Google Adwords is by far the dominant choice because of they have a dominant share (by far) of the search market.

PPC advertising makes sense for websites that can't be optimized. This includes all Flash websites, hosted templates such many ecommerce carts and industries that are highly regulated. Regulated industries are ones that sell securities and must follow SEC rules that control content.

Organic SEO: You can get hung up on the technical details, but it really comes down to doing two things. Having lots of keyword rich content and getting other websites to link to your content. How do you do this?

Write informative and original blogs or articles and post them regularly on your website. If you are a good writer and the ideas that you present are original and insightful, then these much sought after links will come almost automatically.

Others will read what you wrote and then continue on the conversation by writing their own blogs or articles, many times with links to what you wrote. This turns into a very natural link building method and your website will move to the top of the search results for many different phrases. Organic SEO is best done during the business website design process.

Eye Tracking Studies

Eye tracking studies done on Google search results shows that the top three organic listings receive the most attention from searchers. Visibility dropped quickly with organic rankings, starting at a high of 100% for the top listing, dropping to 85% at the bottom of the "above the fold" listings, and then dropping dramatically below the fold from 50% at the top to 20% at the bottom.

Here are some of their other findings:

  1. Searchers typically visit only the top three search results.
  2. More than 80 percent stopped after looking at three results.
  3. 54 percent viewed just one page of search results per visit to the search engine.
  4. Only 19 percent went on to the second page.
  5. Fewer than 10 percent bothered with the third page of results.

A Penn state study shows that people trust organic search rankings over paid advertising. Penn State researchers did a 2005 study and found that over 80% of the searches conducted went to organic search results. "Consumers have a bias against the links that businesses pay search engines to provide," said Jim Jansen, assistant professor in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST).

PPC Optimization Tips

Pay-per-click marketing is a way to quickly get your offer in front of millions of people. PPC can get great results fast or cause you to burn through a lot of money and get no results. The difference is in the planning and execution of your campaign. Like organic SEO, PPC campaigns need optimization.

  1. Keywords: Choose your keywords carefully. They should be highly relevant to your product or service. Don't just select popular phrases. Longer phrases are better for getting PPC results. Research shows that people just starting to learn about a subject will search using 1-2 word phrases. People ready to purchase or take action will search using specific 3-5 word phrases.
  2. Ad copy: Your ad is your initial entry to your landing page. It should include the specific keyword phrase the searcher used to find your ad. This means having a different ad for each keyword phrase (or group of keyword phrases) will increase your conversion rate.
  3. Use landing pages: Never send PPC traffic to the home page of your website. A landing page is a simplified web page with limited or no navigation links and is focused on getting your visitor to take a specific action. To maximize conversion, the keyword phrase used in the original search, should be used in the ad, in the landing page name and headline of the landing page.
  4. Landing page headlines: The landing page headline should be located in the top left portion of the page just below a small company logo. It should include your keyword phrase and clearly state a compelling benefit or how you solve your visitor's problem.
  5. Call to action: Make it easy for your visitor to take action on your landing page. Locate your embedded form or action link where it is clearly visible and above the fold.

Organic SEO methods take much more time to develop any substantial traffic, but they are far less expensive than PPC advertising. Many companies will use both and focus on PPC advertising while they wait for organic SEO results to "kick in."