SEO vs. PPC: The Never Ending Battle

Took special interest in the MediaPost email this morning, titled "SEO Or PPC" because our agency engages with this on almost a daily basis, whether with current clients, or new business. Do more people click on the top listings regardless of a sponsored link (PPC) or organic listing? According to a new study by Engine Ready, PPC performed 50% better (2.03%) when leading users to a retailer's site for a purchase versus users coming from an organic listing (1.26%).

The study measured the 4 major traffic source categories:

• Direct access and bookmarks
• Paid listings
• Organic listings
• Other referrer

Most likely to buy are consumers who navigate directly to a retailer's site by typing in a URL or clicking on a bookmark (7.38% conversion rate). Consumers who came to an e-commerce site from another site or an e-mail converted at 6.58%.

Although a lot can be said about SEO, PPC according to this study can target more people in the purchase funnel, searching out products/services. PPC allows advertisers to test and optimize their campaigns based on keywords, descriptions, offerings (free shipping, promo codes,etc) all on a budget. PPC is one of the first things we reccomend to any client, current or new. SEO is definitely part of an overall strategy, when PPC is typically campaign focused. The best fit is when you can have your SEO and PPC working in tandem, being listed high in both.

To read more from the MediaPost "SEO or PPC", click here

or to read about it on Internet Retailer click here

Five Tips to Help Improve Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

5 Tips to Help Improve Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

For most companies the #1 traffic driver to their company's website is a search engine (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, etc).  In order for your company's organic listing to be seen and clicked on, try these 5 optimizing tips:

1). Optimize Title Tags on Web Pages - Meta tags appear in the code of your web pages and search engines read these tags to help determine the relevancy of a web page.  writing a good title meta tag is the single most important thing you can do to improve your SEO.

2). Create Links Between Pages on Your Web Site - Search engines used programs called "Spiders" that search the web, following links, to find web sites and pages to index and store in their databases.  

Improve your internal links by:

• Creating a robust internal link structure among your web pages for search engines to follow
• Use keyword rich text for the links

3). Use a Site Map - A Site Map or Site Index, is a page on your site that lists and links to all other pages on your site.  It is full of text links that gives a search engine a way to find and index every page on your site.

4). Increase Links From External Web Sites into Deep Pages - Deep pages are pages below the home page in your Site Map.  Having external site links to these pages can help them rise in the search engines' results.  Partner sites, Associations, Blogs, Tweets, etc are a good place to seek out incoming links.  

5). Get Involved in Online Communities - Another way to add external links to your deep pages (Press Releases, Case Studies, etc) is to get involved in online communities important to your customers and industry.  

Some great places to start in are social bookmarking and blog sites such as:

• Delicious.com
• Reddit.com
• Digg.com
• eblogger.com
• wordpress.com
• technorati.com  

The best way to track your efforts in SEO is to chart the progress of your search engine listing by creating a baseline:  Where are you now as a starting point/how far down is your listing?, where is your listing  in 1 month? 6 months? 1 year later?