Paid Advertising

The auction style of bidding ensures you will pay no more than $.05 more than the highest bidder. For example, you bid $5 for placement in search results containing the term “tennis sneakers.” Your competitors bid $2.10, $2.20, and $2.45. You will win the auction with a cost of $2.50 per click on your ad when someone searches for “tennis sneakers.”

Although the amount you bid for ad placement plays a significant role in determining whether or where your ad gets placed, so too does the ad’s relevancy to searcher’s queries. Google also gives each ad a “quality score.” The algorithm behind the quality score evaluates how relevant your ad is and the landing page it takes users to for any given search query.

This is done to ensure buyers are not simply buying keywords to boost their exposure on Google. After all, if someone who sells golf clubs bids on haircuts, Italian food, and Hawaii airfare, the resulting ads would ultimately be of little use to the vast majority of searchers making Google’s search results increasingly irrelevant and ineffective over time.

Google’s quality scoring ranks ads from 1 to 10, 10 being best. If your ads are ranked 8 while your competitors’ ads are ranked 4, your ads should be placed higher even if you bid a bit less than the competition, because your ads are perceived to better meet searchers’ needs.

• Works instantly, just pay and get served. PPC drives instant traffic to a website, if you have sufficient bucks to pay for your business.
• With a limited budget, it is recommended to focus on PPC. PPC is more likely to net conversions, especially in the short-term.
• There are no ups and downs in PPC advertising, it’s always plain straight. Just make sure your website is optimized for visitors and nothing else.
• You can choose where, when and for what kind of keywords you wish to rank.
• In PPC everything is simple – the amount you spend is the amount of traffic you get.
• With AdWords or Bing Ads you’ll be able to harvest an existing demand.
• It may be difficult to gain, say, 10 projects a month purely using SEO if the competition out there means you’ll struggle to get on page one. If this is the case, PPC will allow you to almost force yourself onto the page at a cost that you can afford.
• There is no need to worry about Google Algorithms or updates.
• Your keywords mentioned about have around 10k searches a month in the US (source: Google Traffic Estimator, but take this with a pinch of salt). If you assume a 3% click through rate for top positions – bear in mind that there seems to be a lot of competition so this should be much lower, that’s 300 clicks. Apply your 5% conversion rate and that’s only 15 leads a month. You’ll need both and especially PPC to ensure that you get the above. Just make sure you are targeted with your keywords and geo as much as possible to reduce the wastage. Then use the data you collated through PPC to help refine your SEO strategy.
• Even if your bid for 5-6 position in PPC, you would get the same number of clicks as you get from the number 1 position in SEO.
• The bid for the 5-6 position in PPC, you can get sales right from day 1, unlike SEO.
• PPC can provide much more focused and targeted results.
• There is no limit to the traffic brought in by PPC.

• No long term value.
• Once you stop paying your website has little lead generating power.
• Like renting a house, it doesn’t matter how many years you pay the rent, the house is not yours.
• PPC is pretty much constrained by the campaign dates and budgets.
• While SEO is always essential, PPC can range from utterly useless to essential. It totally depends on which market you are in.
• PPC can be very seductive because you can see quick results and measure them in detail. The ROI is super easy to calculate. But the Google Tax continues to rise and competition will come, and if you’re relying on PPC too heavily, you could find yourself in a difficult situation. Don’t be that frog in the boiling pot.
• CPC costs continue to increase as more advertisers become involved.