Many online businesses rely solely on SEO and other marketing strategies to attract traffic to their websites. While this is important, it’s also to your benefit to use PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to diversify your search strategy. Why? Ranking on the first pages organically isn’t as easy as it once was, and contrary to popular belief – it DOES cost you, in the form of valuable time.
Here are 4 compelling reasons you should be diversifying your search strategy using PPC.
- Paid clicks outnumber organic clicks for commercial search. Different types of keywords determine whether the user clicks on an organic result, or on a paid ad. For instance, when an individual is actually looking to make a purchase, approximately 85% of the top of the page (above the fold) is dedicated to paid ads, or sponsored listings. Users are about 65% more likely when conducting a search with commercial intent to click on a paid ad.
- “Nobody clicks on Google ads anymore” just isn’t true. In fact, studies have shown that about half of those who search may ignore the ads in the right-hand column of the page, but don’t realize that the ads listed above the organic search results at the top of the page are paid ads.
- No matter how SEO changes, it won’t affect your PPC advertising. We all know that the recent Penguin and Panda updates have dramatically changed search results. No one knows what will happen next, and algorithm updates cannot be predicted. With pay-per-click advertising, your ads will be shown – and you’re far less likely to see a dramatic drop-off in traffic because Google has made some “secret” change that you didn’t know about.
- SEO is complex and time consuming. Actually, for most people SEO is a full-time job. As it becomes harder to rank and predict what Google will do next, it also requires more people to develop and implement an SEO strategy. PPC advertising allows you to stay in front of your audience, even when you take a hit from the search engines and have to figure out what went wrong, then take steps to correct it.
Are you using PPC advertising to diversify your search strategy? If you’re relying on SEO or social media alone, you may be missing out on an incredible amount of targeted traffic.
