When a website doesn’t perform in search engines, optimisation will help increase the natural SERP (search engine results page). In the UK this is called SEO Optimisation (differs from the US spelling Optimization).
When e-commerce and service providers first started becoming prominent on the internet, the natural result was an increase in competition and a fight for the high positions on the search engine providers’ websites. This was seen as key to a marketing campaign because the results here are free of charge.
Initially the companies who instead fell victim to the route of paying for traffic found it hard to sustain the traffic they got. As the cost of Pay Per Click (PPC) increased into the 21st Century, and the competition diluted the conversion rates, many companies were left behind in terms of profitability and ability to compete on price. This led to the rise of SEO optimisation and a huge growth in popularity in the ‘marketing mix’. Traffic to a website is the only thing that will aid sales, and this come via only a few different channels:
Directories: There are many local or regional based web directories that can drive traffic to a site, but the volume is minimal expect in the case of Google local listings, which has given many local small business a relatively high amount of free traffic.
Branding: Having a recognised or well known brand will result in people wanting to find a website, when they need a product or service that they associate with the brand. This could be anything from an online shop, a resource site or a contact page for a service provider. Unfortunately, although this kind of marketing doesn’t incur a cost per click in a direct sense, it needs a marketing budget in other areas to help create that brand. This should be calculated and converted into a Cost Per Click (CPC) to help work out the Return On Investment (ROI).
PPC: Pay Per Click can work for many online firms as part of a well balanced marketing campaign, but is simply too expensive for many companies entering a new market. PPC is offered in the form of comparison websites and search engine sponsored links. The cost varies from either set rates like on Pricerunner where it may be around 25-35 pence per click, or a bidding system like on Google and Shoppping.com.
SEO Optimisation: By paying a SEO company you can optimise a website to more friendly to search robots, and to help create pages that are popular for certain keywords, or ‘key phrases’. Over time this can create a website that generates lots of free organic traffic and will help the long term ability of a website to be profitable. This will be more expensive than a PPC campaign in the short term, as the results can take a while to appear, but long term optimisation is seen an important investment.
Tags: Cost Per Click, Internet, Pay Per Click, SEO Sheffield
