Friday, February 1, 2019

Get Your Website Noticed: Slowly or Quickly

Most websites get their traffic from search engine results such as Google, Bing and others. With millions of websites vying for viewer attention on the internet, how can you make yours stand out from the crowd? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) can be strategies to use.
How Search Engines Work
The internet search engines have programs called "crawlers" or "bots" that continually run 24 x 7 searching the internet for website content. They look for new websites, web pages and text within web pages. As those programs find information about websites and content, they send that information back to their home system to be cataloged and indexed. 

To find websites via a search engine, you enter a search term in the search box. The search engines use their algorithms to provide you with a ranked list from their index of what web pages and documents you should be most interested in based on the search term you entered.

Since I have blogged on SEO previously (e.g. The Worst Website, SEO Best Practices for Website Domains and Search Engine Optimization: On-Page vs. Off-Page), I won't go into the mechanics of it in this post. Instead, let's compare SEO to Pay-Per-Click for getting your website noticed.

Slowly: Search Engine Optimization
Boosting visibility to your website, and ultimately your number of visitors, is a combination of several factors that can have long-term benefits. You need to optimize your website so it can be found easily by search engines (hence, Search Engine Optimization) so the search engines can tell people that your website is relevant to their search.

Optimizing your website by embedding relevant keywords in your content is an easy way to make it more visible to the search engines. In order to get the result you hope for, select the keywords that your audience is likely to use. Don't select the keywords based only on how you see your business or what you want to convey. If your audience is primarily industry people (e.g. vendors, industry-savvy clients, peers), you should use industry terms. If your audience is not primarily industry people (e.g. retail or non-industry customers), then use terms that lay people will use.

While updating your content can be quick, it may take 4 to 6 months for you to start seeing the search engine visibility results from your content changes. That's because it can take that long for the "crawlers" or "bots" to revisit your website, find the new content, and understand the relevancy of the new content to everything else it has stored in their index. If you then look to make additional changes based on your observed results, it may take another 4 to 6 months to see the effect of those content changes. That cycle tends to be typical with content changes.

While it can take 4 months or more for search engines to find your website based on keyword entry, the benefit of SEO is that the results are very durable. Once you have honed your SEO implementation and the search engines understand the relevancy of your website's content to search terms, the search engines will remember your website when similarly searched (assuming they don't change their algorithm, which does happen occasionally). Therefore, SEO is a viable and important mid-to-long term strategy for getting your website audience visibility.

Quickly: Pay-Per Click
Essentially, Pay-Per-Click is advertising. The 2 most popular forms of PPC are Google Ads and social media advertising. In a Google Ad campaign, you create an ad (typically that's free) and have Google list the ad for your website at or near the top the regular search listings. When someone clicks on your ad, you pay an agreed upon cost for the click from your budget. Google gives you guidance as to how much a click will cost for a specific search keyword or term. Once your entire budget has been depleted, Google stops running your ad until you replenish your budget fund. You set the budget amount, timeline and geographic location.

The budget amount can be a set amount with no term period or can be an amount set for a specific and periodic term. Let's assume a click will cost you $1.00 and you have a budget of $1,000:
  • When you have an ad with no set time limit, your ad will yield 1,000 clicks to your website no matter how long that takes - 1 day, 1,000 days or more.
  • When you set the budget amount to a term, such as $20 per day. That means that once 20 people clicked on your site for a single day (at any time of the day), the ad will stop displaying until the next day. The next day, the budget will reset and you may receive up to 20 clicks again. Assuming you get 20 clicks each day, your ad will last for 50 days.
Your budget can also identify a geographic region for display. If your business is local, your region may be 1 or more zip codes, one or more counties or one or more states. Google will display the ad on a person's search engine results when they are physically located in the region you set. The person's region is typically determined by the IP address of the network where the person is using Google. By limiting the region, you extend the term of your budget since people outside of your region will not see or click on the ad.

Google Ads are not affected by SEO, crawlers or bots, or the search engine algorithms. Once activated, the ad displays your website in the search result at the very moment a person enters a search term that matches your ad. Hence, the impact of PPC is immediate. On the other hand, when you discontinue the ad, or you exceed your budget, the ad immediately stops displaying your website. Either way, it does not affect the search engine index or SEO growth you are working to build.

Pay-Per-Click is available on Bing as well as Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms. While we won't go into the details of those products in this post, suffice it to say that the basic intent and functionality are similar across platforms.

SEO vs. PPC
SEO
PPC
SEO results can be slow to achieve. You need time to develop the content to achieve strong organic visibility. And, you need patience while the search engines relate the indexed content to search terms.

There is no faster way to get your website in front of customers at the moment they are ready to buy than via PPC search engine advertising.

Improve your organic traffic. While organic search is not quick or easy to attain, it's very long lasting and durable once attained.
PPC appears at or near the top of the search result content. Typically a user will always see the paid search ads ahead of the organic ads.

Once your website attains a good ranking, your competitors need to work that much harder to display ahead of you.
Your ad displays for as long as your budget and campaigns are active. Once a campaign exceeds your budget or terms, your ad no longer displays.

Your website visibility is not bound by any specific geography or key word constraints. The search engine algorithms will display your website based on the relevance of the website content to the search terms entered.

When you need an assured, laser-focused advertisement., PPC allows you to target your geographic region and specific search terms to achieve your results.
SEO is essentially free. While you can hire a consultant to help you implement and monitor SEO, once implemented the organic nature of the growth occurs without any cost.
PPC campaigns can be expensive. It's important that you set your goals and budget as specifically as possible. Then, monitor your cost and performance. If not, you may find that your advertising cost is more that you would like.

So which is better? That's not a vaild question to ask. Both are strategies that are available to the website owner, and they are meant to be used for different reasons or to compliment each other. Use both wisely and effectively, but to acheilve different goals and results. One approach might be to use PPC for about 3-4 months until SEO begins to take hold. Or, use PPC to get immediate attention to specific or short-term campaigns, while using SEO to build a solid organic hold in the search engines.


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