Pay Per Click

Pay-per-click (PPC) is one of those terms that you hear connected to keywords so often people think PPC is similar to  SEO. SEO is different from PPC. Some PPC services focus on search rankings, other are focusing more on text advertisements.

The main goal of PPC is usually getting traffic, but you want more out of PPC than just visitors. One of the most important elements is getting conversions from incoming traffic.

PPC has some advantages compared to search engine optimization:

There are no changes needed to the design of your site. You don’t have to alter the code or add other elements to your website. It is simple, choose the keywords and pay.

PPC implementation is quick and easy. You just have to sign up for a PPC program. This might take you several minutes, after that, you just choose the keywords you want to target and start getting traffic. With only pure SEO without a PPC campaign, it could take a few months before you start receiving some real traffic to your site. With PPC the effect is immediate.

PPC implementation is quick and easy to start and you don’t have to be an expert to set it up. But you can get much better results if you are familiar with PPC and choose the correct keywords.

But there are limits with PPC as well as with SEO. Competition may be fierce. Bidding for keywords might be the real field battle. Each competitor wants to get the top results so the keywords cost might increase dramatically. Big companies have a special PPC expert that is monitoring the positions for keywords in search engines and amending bids accordingly.

Monitoring positions is crucial to maintain good placement, however, because you do have to fight for your ranking, PPC programs can become prohibitively expensive. The competitiveness of the keywords or phrases and the aggressiveness of the competition determine how much you’ll have to pay at the end.

Ad placements from PPC bidding don't have any effect on organic traffic from search engines. Organic traffic will not improve in search engines when your ads are visible because of PPC. So if you want to rank for keywords in other search engines, you will have to apply for their PPC program also. PPC ads are only paid advertisements and nothing more. PPC will not have any positive effect on your SEO whatsoever.

Before you start with the Pay Per Click campaign you should know more about which keywords to target. Not all the keywords are the same effect, some may bring higher conversions than others.

With PPC you should always test and test the whole campaign, bidding, conversions. Start with a few keywords and see how much traffic you are getting, how much sales do you get, and then slowly increase the number of keywords.

And you should have a method to track the ROI (return on investment). If your goal is selling products, you will want to track conversions, perhaps by directing the visitors funneled to your site by your PPC link to a sales page. That’s how you will be able to track your ROI and how much you are paying for each sale.

When you are comparing different PPC programs try to find out their guidelines about how sites appear in listings, carefully study their TOS (terms of service), how they prevent fraudulent clicks, how they handle fraud, how they calculate visits. These are important issues, especially for fraudulent clicks because you don’t want to pay for those.

Usually, it takes several testing before you find out the best PPC program. But usually Google and Yahoo PPC programs are the most popular so most people decide on one of these two. But after enough testing and trial and error and diligent effort, you’ll see that PPC programs can help increase your site traffic and get you conversions faster than without the PPC program.