Newsflash Article: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) - MADE EASY
by Barbara Bauer

Marketing websites online can take many forms. However, the two most popular ways to advertise websites are through search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising. Each of these methods has one aim; to get the people searching for your product or service onto your website. How they achieve this goal differs slightly and each of these are discussed below.

WHY IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION IMPORTANT?

  • To make your website investment worthwhile, it needs to be visible to customers and search engines.
  • Search engine optimisation allows this to happen for free. In reality, there are only half a dozen search engines worth spending time over, with Google, Yahoo and MSN being the biggest of these.
  • In contrast to Pay Per Click advertising, Search Engine Optimisation places your website prominently in search engines' natural results, also referred to as "organic results". The advantage of these organic results is that they are seen as the more credible source of search results by internet users and these results are also seen as more trustworthy.

ADVANTAGES OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

  • Will work for any business which has successfully run pay per click campaigns for at least 6 months
  • Clicks from the search engine to your website will cost you nothing
  • Once you've reached top positions, you will most likely stay there
  • More searchers click on ‘organic results' (around 60% vs. 40% pay per click)
  • Can appear in hundreds of search results page
  • Cheaper than pay per click advertising in the long run

DISADVANTAGES OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

  • Expensive
  • Very time consuming
  • Lots of highly specialised manual labour involved (programming of source codes, etc.)
  • Can take up to 8 months to see first results
  • Search engines change and evolve all the time. In the worst case, you can lose positions overnight.

RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUR BUSINESS

In summary, the main difference between SEO and PPC are the risks involved. With SEO, you are trusting your marketing agency to achieve good positions. However, even experienced professionals sometimes fail to achieve their goals because of Google's ever changing algorithms (changes are made every 3-6 months). A change to an algorithm can see your online positions lost in a period of months, weeks or even days.
With PPC, the chances of losing positions are extremely small. If your agency is doing a proper job, you should always be seen on page No 1 of Google or Yahoo. However, these guaranteed positions come at a price and with competition increasing day by day, staying at the top can become an expensive exercise for business that are positioned in a competitive market.

SUMMARY

If you are serious about your online marketing and online sales or new client leads are crucial to your business, we always recommend testing Pay Per Click advertising first for 6 months.

After 6 months, we then analyse and assess the results to date. Depending on the bottom line of the online marketing activities for your business, we then prepare a tailored recommendation for your SEO. In most cases, it actually makes sense to run both, Pay Per Click advertising and Search Engine Optimisation.

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