eBranding Using Pay Per Click Advertising

By Paul Symonds

Many people start using Pay Per Click advertising with the intention to use it as a short-term way of driving traffic to their site and to achieve sales, whilst in the mean time planning to improve organic results through SEO techniques. Is PPC advertising a short term technique though and what are some tricks for optimising and benefitting from PPC?

What I have found after a while is that when a site comes very high is organic results, one then has the choice to reduce or stop the AdWords expenditure for that keyword phrase or the choice to keep the expenditure going. It is not a simply choice of stopping the AdWords I have found because you can begin to double up your marketing efforts and brand heavily on the web with i) both high placed natural, organic search results, ii) a 3rd or 4th place PPC placed ad and iii) a Google Maps entry which displays for a few important, related expressions.

The point is that why remove your PPC expenditure (whether it be for Facebook, Overture or AdWords expenditure) if the ROI (Return on investment) is good. In other words, if you are getting sales which substantiate the PPC costs, then it can often make more sense to keep the PPC expenditure so that you have your company name and presence in more than one key area on a results page, with your combination of a good natural search results position and a nicely located position 3 or 4 sponsored position (I say 3 or 4 because these are often much cheaper and yet equally as effective as positions 1 and 2 which many people ignore).

Google Maps is free to submit your business listing to and your business may also get a 3rd listing on the one web page for a given search term thus you really begin to brand heavily and overall quite cheaply. Many of the largest companies appear to use this way of branding with a double or triple presence for many search terms.

There is a reason why you may not want to retain a budget for a search term which already rates highly in organic searches and this is because you might need the budget now to tackle other key expressions in AdWords, for which you would like to show but did not previously have the budget for. The main point is to think carefully abut branding as well as organic search positions, when deciding on whether or not to use AdWords for a given keywords phrase.

Paul writes for Cardiff online emarketing and Cardiff SEO work