What kind of advantages can we see from using pay per click?

Be very careful and hire an expert, or all you will end up with is a bigger credit card bill.

I set up one for us wrong and it was costly.

Benefits of Pay-per-Click Search Engine Marketing
Benefits of pay-per-click search engine marketing include, but are not limited to:

1. An immediate response. Your ads will show within minutes.

2. Great for launching time sensitive campaigns and for testing new/different offers.

3. Can find low hanging fruit in the form of "Long Tail Keywords" that are cheap and highly converting, but would otherwise be too specific to build an SEO strategy around.

4. Alternatively, pay-per-click might be the only way to rank for some of the more competitive and general keywords. I don't typically advocate this strategy, but there are some cases where the best keyword phrase is very popular, converts well, and is extremely difficult to rank for naturally.

5. Analyzing the effectiveness of a pay-per-click campaign (landing pages, ad copy etc.) will help determine what will be effective in a natural search campaign saving you the time and resources required in a long term SEO strategy.

I prefer bid-based with a strict budget. Don't overbid or compete against Goliath. There are plenty of cheaper terms you can use to experiment.

Bad example: Say you sell dogs. Don't sponsor "dogs." You will be competing against Petco, and searchers could be looking for cute pictures, school research, whatever... Now the term "I want to buy a dog today" there may be only 5 searches, but guess what? It's way cheaper and they are all customers.

So at first I would say go bid based, but play it very tight. Have fun once you see what is working. Hope this helps.

Bobby
http://www.sdsol.com

All search marketing is composed of two types of search products. Search engine optimization is the process of improving a website so that it has all of the necessary components to be properly cataloged by the search engines and appear highly (first page) in organic search rankings. Organic rankings are those search returns which appear in the center of the search results page (above the fold). Search engine marketing is the process of pay per click advertising, invented by Google, which is now available through all search engines.

While both strategies have their merits, SEO is clearly the best long term strategy for any business. There are many reasons why this is true:
• The top five organic results on any SERP (search results page) are consistently the highest the highest rated for viewership and click through.
• SEO is a strategy with staying power which also improves your website's overall performance against your competitors. Good SEO exploits a competitor's website weaknesses making it more difficult for the competition to unseat your ranking.
• SEO is much lower in cost over the long run as compared to SEM.
• SEO is a process, not a product. The average SEO campaign takes 90 days to optimize. The process is labor intensive during that initial time then only requires regular, less intensive, maintenance to maintain in position. SEM should be used to provide lucrative traffic for websites during the initial optimization phase.
• The biggest mistake SEO sites make is to abandon SEO maintenance once a high ranking is attained. Maintenance provides the basis to bat down challenges as they arrive on individual terms. If a website steps away from maintenance the site will slide back near square one once the competitor realizes they have lost their ranking and it is adversely affecting their traffic and business.

Why would a website consider SEM?

• SEM is a great short term traffic driver. Websites can drive traffic for specific terms in short bursts to support timed promotions.
• SEM can fill in any gaps that arise from competitors bids. For instance, if a competitor has a product with which your site wants to compete, businesses can level the playing field with SEM until you optimize your website for the new terms.
• SEM gets instantaneous results. The product works much like stock market day trading. You bid on words to effectively gain an advantage over competitors. It is a labor intensive process that requires daily and even hourly attention to optimize.
• Pay per click is most effective if the site appears in page positions 4, 5 or 6 on the SERP. Those spots are generally found on the right hand side of the page.
• The biggest losers on the SERP page are positions 1, 2 and 3. These positions are consistently identified by independent panels as the worst selling positions on the page.

Pay per click generally gets you, your business and your website exposure while controlling and minimizing ad costs. Due dilligence with keyword search is crucial for this strategy to work. If you want any assistance with keyword search or other online marketing techniques, feel free to contact me at alisonsilbert@fastmail.fm.