Jul 23 2008
Why You Should Focus On Organic Search Results Rather Than PPC Advertising
There is a simple answer to why you should concentrate on organic search results rather than PPC advertising: it’s cheaper. With PPC, you pay to play. As such, it’s a good way for new businesses to get a foothold in search engine rankings. Ideally, though, you won’t have to do this forever and you’ll have a top ten ranking without ever having to pay for it. That’s the dream of every site owner. I personally have many such sites in my web inventory.
You should try to make the dream a reality. One of the problems with PPC advertising is that it becomes a kind of crutch. Overnight you can get a top ten search result for a search—a great result with relatively little work, just cost. What happens is that site owners rely too heavily on PPC campaigns and don’t focus enough energy on organic search results. Imagine if your business was in the top ten of both the sponsored and standard search results: you’ll have twice the visibility.
If you have a high ranking via organic search results two things have happened: you have a number of backlinks to your site and your site has been optimized via content for that search phrase. Other things affect search engine rankings, but these are the two basic ones. The second issue is supremely important because it means you are providing a content-rich site for new web surfers. Content is not just a way to rank high in the search engines but a way to create an impressive site that will inspire repeat visitors. The results are two-fold.
There are some other very important issues at stake. In Google, for one, organic search results are much larger and more immediate than sponsored results, which are off to the side. Web surfers very often look to organic search results first. The quality of sites using sponsored results is also waning, almost to the point that these sites seem like spam. The longer this continues, the more people will click on organic results before sponsored results.
In the early going, web surfers were not savvy enough to realize that sponsored results were a PPC marketing effort. This is less true today. The thinking is that if a site lands in the top ten without having to pay for it, they must be the best resource on the topic. Finally, another issue is that pay-per-click bidding costs are on the rise. It makes just as much sense to hire a content-writing firm to create pages of new content for the site, and optimize that content for search engines, as it does to invest in PPC.
Organic Real Estate as opposed to PPC
When it comes to real estate, people usually shout out the mantra: location, location, location. When it comes to web real estate, you could say the same thing: location, location, location in search engines. Organic real estate on the web refers to the positioning your website has on the web landscape. A solid organic real estate design and SEO strategy will make a website as necessary a destination as the corner market. In short, organic real estate keeps a website from languishing unseen in cyberspace.So how does Organic Real Estate work? What makes Organic Real estate, well, organic? The main feature of Organic Real Estate is quality, informative content. This is what sets quality SEO plans apart from those that are merely trying to trick search engine spiders. Content should be natural, not written as if composed by a machine. Natural, well-written web content will increase page rank at a faster rate than content that is written only with keywords in mind.
This is especially important for web entrepreneurs who run affiliate sites. Web surfers are getting savvy to the fact that many affiliate sites are just a dummy site set-up to “hopefully” bring in some sales. Experienced affiliate marketers know that you can make a site that is as competitive, and useful, as the affiliate’s host site. The more quality content there is on your site, the better an affiliate site can separate itself from the crowded web marketplace.
But Organic Real Estate is about a lot more than content—and this is where a lot of SEO plans fall short. In addition to providing content, a site owner must determine a target audience. In one way, content and target audience go hand in hand. You have to figure out target audience and tailor content accordingly. In addition, you may have a different target audience for different products or services offered on your site. Content and keyword targeting must be tailored to each potential type of client and customer.
Without these strategies, what will you have: a site that looks more like a link-factory than a trusted resource in a particular industry. In the past, people stressed the need for quality web design. While this is no doubt important, it is now much easier for amateur’s to design a high-quality looking site. It is far less easy for site owners to provide fresh and useful content. You’ll find a bevy of nice-looking sites with little or nothing to offer in terms of content. In Web 2.0, content is what separates the great from the mediocre, and the organic from the artificial.
Most excellent content sites are not top design examples. In fact, if you can design a simple site to answer the query made by the searcher, the chances are that a sale will result in about every 50 visits to that page. This is a good average, and some affiliates can actually convert at an even higher ratio. Make content and product information your focus, and use simple yet professional presentations. No need to have fancy if the content is effective. Make more money by having the answer to specific queries.
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