Why should you bother actually paying for visitors to come to your website when you can work very hard to achieve page one status on the free side of the search engines?

First of all, dial your time machine back to to the year 1999, a time when people cared a lot about being in the phone book. If you ran a business you probably had a business phone which came with a free listing in the white business pages. Those were freebies. Some businesses would go so far as to put small display ads in their listing which they had to pay extra for.

What if the phone book company offered that business owner the option of only paying for the ad in proportion to the number of people that actually called the number from that listing? Would you prefer that to the flat $200 a month or something? You could be paying that $200 a month and never receive one more call than you would have with the freebie. 

That is essentially what a Pay Per Click campaign is. Moving from the free listings to a more robust listing at the top of the page can bring more exposure and attention. Let's take quick overview of some of the positives and negatives for Free Vs. PPC listings.

This is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEO deals with coming up in free listing search results and SEM has to do with Pay Per Click and Banner Ad Campaigns. 

SEO Free Listings - Not So Free

Achieving top results for free search engine listings is going to cost you time and money. Unless you are really up to speed on how to wave the proper wands will need to hire a professional to do it, which may be your web master. You have to pay for their time and efforts to get the results you want. Here are some of the things you need to understand.

Google in particular ranks your site in this order

• The number and importance of outside links from other websites back to your website. This is why should have a Facebook and LinkedIn pages that has a link back to your site, it's very important. The more one way links back to your website that you have raises that individual page’s importance, especially to Google.
• In addition your site should be on Yelp, Twitter (having interesting enough content on the site to Tweet about), your photos should be on Flickr and if you can do some video interviews they should be on YouTube (the #2 largest search engine).
• You should be writing articles on your subject of expertise and submitting them to online publishers. Include in those articles links back to your site.
• You should be listed manually into Google, Yahoo and Bing local listings. This helps you show up on the map when searchers type in your city name as part of the search.

Also, in doing the above all will help your site to start showing up in search results which in turn will lead people to the website itself. Then comes the content of your site itself.

Site Content Management

The richness of the exact words and phrases in the body of the text on your site as well as how those words relate to the other content on the site is very important. How you choose those word is another key ingredient. 

Let’s take “SEC Receiverships”. An attorney wanted us to makes sure his site ranked well for this term. This is a worthless term. In checking with Google, Wordtracker and other tools at our disposal it has been typed into a search maybe once in the last month. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is searching for this term. So spending time trying to rank well for this would be a waste.

Unless you have invested in the tools to do proper search term research, you have to rely on either voodoo or examining the entrails of a goat to divine which direction to go. Again, time and money.  

Another phrase he wanted to work with was “Wealth Preservation”. That could get some activity. In addition you can insure sponsored rankings for only .18 per click, but that's another subject for below. 

In avoiding PPC ( which I don’t recommend) and looking only at free listings, that phrase needs to be properly weaved into the contents on the proper page on that subject with the correct density and used along with other phrases that would be used like “wealth preservation strategies” “protect your assets” “succession planning” “legacy planning” “estate taxes” “wealth preservation solutions” “asset preservation strategies” strategies wealth creation protection” - all these phrases are used consistently by people searching on this subject and should be worked into the wording on the page dedicated to that target market.

If the proper wording and phrases are not worked into the site correctly then there is little we can do to wave wands on the outside and get rankings. Google will send it’s robot to your site (probably already has – even while being created) and it will read your words, look for any changes, take it back to it’s indexing server – which will then check for your incoming links and then sort you out in a ranking based on those findings. Just how important are you in comparison with other sites for “wealth preservation”? Remember you will be competing against Merrill Lynch, Mellon Bank, National City Bank, Ameriprise, etc.

We are more than willing to undertake going after traffic like this but in order to do so we would need to expand the agreement for the time necessary to target all the areas like this. In addition we would need permission to write the copy professionally to work in the proper wording to get the rankings, even creating special ‘landing pages’ geared to targeting those key phrases and words.

Yahoo has a whole different criteria to go after, along with Bing, MSN, Ask and the others. I won’t go there here, you get the idea. The question is do you have the time and money to invest to get this all right? Most web developers don't throw in all this to get the site up and running. 

Even if you are doing a PPC campaign, I still recommend investing in solid SEO strategies as some people really avoid click on sponsored ads. 

Pay Per Click - Can Cost You Less

Pay Per Click can be huge for you. Think of the white pages in the phone book again. You have a free listing there because you have a business line (SEO). That was not good enough for you so you maybe upped the ante and paid a bit extra for a larger display ad inline. The online version would simply allow you to Pay Per Call instead of a steady monthly no matter if the phone rings or not.

In addition with PPC you can rank at the top almost immediately. Terms with little competition can be had for .18-.20 per click. I have companies paying from .20 to 2.00 per click, depending on the competition for that term. The key to success here is your conversion ratio.

When you consider the huge man hours involved in working to make your "Free" listing effective, it's not so free anymore. Paying for Pay Per Click can be far less expensive and bring rewards very quickly. Then comes the conversion ratio, which is the whole point, getting the sale.

Having “Landing Pages” that are properly set up so that when people do “click” they should come to a page dedicated to the subject of that click then leading them to make a contact or phone call to you. People expect to immediately find what they clicked on the link for. The beauty of PPC is that you can contol that easily. With SEO you are never quite sure if what the engines dish up are exactly what they were searching for.

The other great thing about PPC is that you can do it within a defined geographical area. Your ads may be set to only show for a 100 mile radius of the city of your choice. Using Facebook, you can even target gender, education or age range. Thus you target you market with much more precision.

There is a lot more to be said for PPC but I'll create a follow post for that.