Businesses of all sizes, large and small, use SEM to promote their websites.
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Pay-per-click advertisements and organic search engine optimization listings are used in online marketing strategies to generate site traffic and revenues. PPC ads appear on websites and any search engine result pages. With SEO, website owners don’t pay for advertising. Instead, they use different tools and techniques to optimize their sites so that their listings appear organically on the first page of search engine results.
PPC Ad Basics
An advertiser pays a publisher or affiliated partner any time an Internet user clicks the advertiser’s PPC ad on the publisher’s site. As a business owner, you might arrange for other businesses to post PPC ads on your site or pay to place PPC ads on other websites to drive traffic back to your business homepage or e-commerce store. Pay-per-click ads that appear on search engine result pages are also known as sponsored ads. When an Internet user searches for a specific keyword or phrase, an advertiser’s relevant paid PPC ad appears with the search results.
SEO Basics
If you’re like many Internet searchers, you probably don’t often go past the first page of results. For this reason, it’s critical to have your website’s listing appear on that page. Yet, search engine algorithms rank websites based on a combination of factors, such as keywords, tags and site content relevance and quality. With SEO, you set up your site in a way that naturally convinces the algorithms that your listing is worthy of first page ranking. For example, you might analyze targeted search tendencies and use the most relevant, commonly-searched keywords in your website content, or partner with other sites to share links.
Page Layout Differences
On websites, pay-per-click ads appear as static or animated image-based banner ads or text links. On search engine results pages, they’re usually labeled as advertising and appear above, below or next to the regular search results in a short list that somewhat mimics the format of the regular search results listings. Sometimes PPC listings are displayed inside of a box or displayed on a background that’s a different color than the rest of the page. On the other hand, organic SEO listings appear at the top of the regular listings in the middle of the search results page.
PPC and SEO Tools
The Internet is overflowing with free, low-cost and paid high quality tools designed to help business owners better understand this topic and succeed. For example, Google and Microsoft both offer PPC- and SEO-related information and tools (links in Resources). Additionally, many website offer individual tools for specific needs, such as keyword, tag or anchor text optimizers, duplicate content checkers and Web traffic analyzers. For example, you can analyze keywords by word, niche or group with tools like Wordtracker, Keyword Eye or Wordstream’s Free Keyword Tools (links in Resources).
Cost Considerations
With pay-per-click, you pay a publisher whenever someone clicks your ads or you pay a search engine provider, such as Google or Microsoft, to place ads for your website on results pages. Given the many free SEO tools online, you don’t have to pay anything extra for SEO, except for the time invested in setting up your site and links, unless you need expert SEO assistance. As a result, SEO is often considered more cost-effective than PPC advertising over time.
Photo Credits
- Brand X Pictures/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images