Just mention the term PPC (Pay per Click) advertising and you will see many people convulse. For them, PPC is a bad word and they believe SEO is the be all and end all. PPC is feared and seen as useless and avoidable expense, as the best traffic is the traffic that comes for free (read from organic listing).
Well, it is not at all useless, and avoidable or not depends upon the niche you work in and the seasonality of your product. I came to know this during one of the chat sessions I had with a group of smart people on SEO in London.
I learned a lot about PPC and SEO best practice for managing campaigns in UK, and how both get along quite easily. Just to let you know I did managed several adword campaigns in USA, but feel if you manage the same in UK you must hire a local consultant to improve your ROI. UK English is far different than US and it’s hard to identify the golden keyword, if you don’t have an idea on how they spell out a term.
The biggest learning was the knowledge of why PPC should be used, and when it is more effective than SEO. If you have a smart consultant, your investments in PPC e.g. Adwords, Yahoo Search marketing and others will show you improved ROI.
Why to use PPC advertising?
Reason 1: PPC advertising becomes more useful than SEO when you are running a time-sensitive promotion or when the product you are offering is seasonal by nature like Christmas gifts, New Year event, Rock concert, etc.
Reason 2: It comes handy when we require immediate search presence, as we all know that getting results from SEO takes at least 2-3 months.
Reason 3: PPC advertising can also help a website that has non-SEO friendly pages (flash content, AJAX, dynamic pages, etc.) get search traffic.
Reason 4: It is not uncommon to find that a website which deserves a presence on the first page of SERP (Search Engine result pages) is not getting a proper ranking, despite everything being right about it. In situations like this, PPC advertising comes handy.
Reason 5: PPC advertising becomes very helpful when you want to test the strength of your keywords, effectiveness of your marketing message, efficacy of the sales page, and design of your website, etc.
Conclusion
As we saw above, there are situations in which we have to use PPC advertising to get the traffic. And I believe that a judicious mix of PPC and SEO along with social media (twitter, digg, etc.), blogging, etc., is required to get required results from online marketing.
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