Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Paying for position
Although 65% of people never click on paid links, 35% of people do. To make sure you have a complete Internet marketing campaign, a PPC (Pay Per Click) strategy can compliment your organic listing.
If you have a new website, a PPC campaign can ensure that you’re still going to be listed for your chosen keywords while your organic listing improves. Paying for position means that you will instantly appear for your search terms. Paid links appear either above or to the side of the organic listings, and are often referred to as paid or sponsored links.
PPC can also be very useful if you are in a very competitive industry. Staying at the top of the rankings for a very competitive keyword is very challenging, and you will find that there will be a constant fluctuation of position as competitors improve their SEO campaign and the Google algorithm is updated. In this case, having additional sponsored links can help ensure that your site will be visible to the searchers.
Other advantages of PPC campaigns include having much more control over who the advert is presented to. This allows you to qualify searchers to see if they are in fact making a relevant search for your company or service. This can be done through a number of options including geographic targeting, key phrase matching and negative keyword matching. Advanced options such as these help ensure that you are paying for only targeted traffic to your site.
The ranking order of an advert in Google is made up of 3 factors:
- Amount bid
- Advert popularity
- Landing page quality
Ensuring that the user is taken to a relevant page from the link is vital to converting the traffic. If you take them to a page that has no relevance to the text in the link, they will leave the site straight away and you will have paid for nothing. Creating specific landing pages, or using page optimisers is then also a crucial aspect to your PPC campaign.