Productive Advertising - PPC vs Natural Listings
When we type in a search term, two kinds of results are displayed. On the left hand side of the screen we get the natural or generic results. These are generated by Google by trawling every site in the world, assessing it’s content, popularity and general usefulness and then running them through an algorithm so complicated Google has three buildings in Mountain View California just to house the written versions. The paid results are displayed on the right hand side, or, if the search is conducted from a content members website they are displayed above and below the generic searches.
The two types of result are different in many ways, but are also the same in one important way - that being that they are sorted by relevance in their category.
The obvious advantage of generic listings is that they don’t cost anything. Although not costing anything is a very relative statement. To get a top ranking requires a top site with top exposure and backlinks from other top sites. Generally this is not cheap. One can expect to pay a heavy price in time to get a natural top listing, or a heavy price in money to pay someone else to get it for you. There is also no guarantee of a top listing. You could spend thousands on a website and pay SEO specialists for years and still never achieve a first page spot, let alone a top ranking.
PPC has the opposite issues. It’s the quick and dirty answer to getting traffic to your site in a hurry. You don’t need to worry(much) about onsite optimization, page rank or other such annoyances - you just slap down your dollar and away you go. The problem, of course, is that you must slap down your dollar. And sometimes you are lucky to get away with just one.
In general you should be looking to achieve both together. PPC will get people to your website fast, but when they get there you should try to make the site as interactive and interesting as possible. Give them a reason to come back. Give them a reason to tell their friends and you will find that your site will be rewarded in the generic listings by google. Working with PPC and generic listings together will help your site be as productive as possible.
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