The Pros and Cons of Search Engine Placement

Pay Per Click
Today's search engines more and more have moved to a paid placement model or what is commonly referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC) thou some free or Organic search engines do still exist. Their are advantages with each of these models. PPC engines gives advertisers the power of being able to create and edit their own ads much like placing a newspaper print ad along with the speed of instant gratification. Where as Organic engines can take months to spider, index and update their databases, PPC generally lets you publish your ads in as little as a few minutes. One of the obvious down sides to PPC is cost thou if properly managed and carefully looked after can still be very profitable and viable way of bring targeted customers to your doors. However if not managed properly for numerous reasons PPC marketing can bankrupt a business fast.

Some reasons why your PPC marketing campaigns can fail are poor selections of keywords. More commonly than not poor keyword choices can bring PPC disaster. Choosing a keyword that is too broad often brings a higher number of clicks with lower conversion rates. The goal with PPC is to target the web surfer who is looking to buy.

Before committing to any keyword selections it would be wise to do some research on your potential keyword list. You can go to a site like overture.com that offers a free keyword suggestion tool and you can get current keyword bid amounts and estimated number of clicks. However please be aware that Overture is a PPC engine and wants to sell you it's services. With Overture you can still find your-self making poor keyword selections by using skewed data. For this reason we suggest using a tool like wordtracker.com. Wordtracker gives non-bias un skewed reports on the search terms people are looking for while using searching engines.

Let's assume for a moment you are putting together an affiliate site selling the weight loss supplement "Trim Spa". Some obvious keyword selections may be "diet supplements", "Trim Spa", "buy Trim Spa" and "buy Trim Spa online". Now consider the broad term "diet supplements" where currently bids are at $1.15 per click. How many searches are done on the term? How many clicks would you receive to your site each day? What do you think your conversion rate would be? If you had a super site with lot's of information, facts and testimonials you may be able to convert some of the clicks on a broad term such as this... after all Trim Spa is a diet supplement. But then consider our alternatives "Trim Spa" $1.01 per click where you have someone searching for this specific product, "buy Trim Spa" $0.25 per click where your user is looking to buy but may possible be looking for a retail store or "buy Trim Spa online" $0.10 per click where you are almost guaranteed this is a person who is looking to buy the product you are selling from an online outlet. The only other considerations in converting the sale is total price including shipping charges and the user experience of your site... in other words how easy is it for the customer to select a product and checkout.

Other PPC essentials is conversion tracking. To survive in the Pay Per Click world you will need to effectively monitor and track conversion rates of each of your individual PPC campaigns. Some PPC Engines offer conversion tracking but here again your relying on the engine to give you un bias data and if you place your campaigns with more than one PPC engine not all will offer this service or may vary greatly in how they are used making the code on your site harder to manage. For these reasons we suggest using a Conversion Tracking tool such as Traffic-Matters.com that will allow you to manage and track campaigns across multiple PPC search engines.