Pay-Per-Click advertising brings you guaranteed “Page 1 positioning” for your keyword. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it is advertising, so it stops when you stop spending money, and it has less “PREselling” power.
In the past, PPCs were actually considered Search Engines at which you bid for top keyword placement in the search rankings. Overture (now known as “Yahoo! Search Marketing”) was considered a good Search Engine. It even won a couple of relevance contests. FindWhat (now “MIVA”), an excellent second tier PPC engine, also did a credible job.
But that model has morphed. Few people actually search at Overture or the others anymore -- no one considers PPCs to be “Search Engines” at this point. Instead, they distribute ads through their network of Search Engines (mostly Yahoo!) and major content sites (CNN, etc., through “Content Match” which you can safely ignore). Google’s entry intensified the Pay-Per-Click advertising format (as opposed to “placement”). It’s a subtle but important change.
PPCs are best investigated after you have a built a solid foundation of content based upon C
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If you rely entirely on the PPCs for your traffic, you never really own your business. Once you stop paying, your visitors stop coming. On top of that, your relationship with your visitors is purely commercial so these skeptical visitors convert into customers at a much lower rate.
Instead, build trust and credibility through content and generate much better Conversion Rates.How do PPCs work?
Great question. You bid to place your ad in front of a searcher’s eyeballs while she is searching for a certain keyword that is of relevance to your business... and her search. In other words, you bid for keyword positioning in the advertising parts of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
For example, if one of your pages focuses on the topic of “penny stocks,” you bid for high positioning amongst the ads that Google and Yahoo! deliver for that word (the ads are separated from the actual editorial-content listings). Each time someone clicks through to your site via the ad on the search results page, the PPC charges you the amount that you bid.
Bidding starts at a very affordable rate for most words. What about the expensive ones? You’ll build Keyword-Focused Content Pages and sell advertising!
Advertising is not as “PREselling”-pure as being found through the “editorial search results.” And when you stop spending, the ads (and traffic) disappear. But great KFCPs endure, especially if you keep growing your site’s Content, inbound links, etc.
SBI!’s Monetize It! module will show you which of your pages are candidates for selling advertising, and where you should be building more (future) high-profit pages (if the nature of the Content fits your site, of course).
Pay-Per-Click advertising is a tradeoff. You pay for the guaranteed exposure, and savings in time and aggravation for free editorial/content listings on the Search Engine Results Page (“SERP”).
While Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture) first “invented” pay-per-click advertising, Google took it to the next level. Let’s briefly examine both… 