Strawberries. Chicken. Avocados. 
Search engine rankings. – All things that are best served organically.
The practice of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is split into two parts: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. SEO is the process of getting your pages to naturally rank for certain key terms. Within the SEO industry, this is typically referred to as ranking “organically”. This is the “free” part of search engine marketing. (I put free in quotes because it still takes effort and time to make it happen, and neither of those resources are free.) Organic rankings are why companies fight for better results and hire SEO consultants.
The flip side of the coin is paying to appear for a given search term. Many search engines have a business model based on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, meaning that the advertiser only pays every click on their ad. A similar comparison would be having to pay for a billboard only if someone called the number.
But, like ranking organically, there are underlying complexities to the process. For example, the entire system is a bidding process. If you’re willing to pay $1.00 to appear for a term, but other companies are willing to pay more, they will appear higher than your ad. If enough bidders are willing to pay more than you, your ad won’t appear at all.
To help clarify the different types of links on a search results page, this screen shot is from a search for “advertising” in Google. In the image below the Google Sponsored Links (advertisements) are highlighted in red.
Click to Enlarge
The Pros of Pay-Per-Click Advertising
- You will instantly show up for the search terms you want. By paying for sponsored link, you guarantee (assuming that you’re bidding enough) that you show-up for the search terms. This can be very effective as your organic efforts take effect.
- You have control over where the traffic goes. With organic rankings, the results are pages that the search engine feels are the best match. For all you know, it could be an archived press release for 3 years ago. With PPC, you get to determine which page on your site the visitor lands.
- PPC ads can be used to advertise timely specials. If you’re already organically ranking on a page, a PPC ad will allow you to call attention to a special, promotion, or event. If you were to make a new page on your site for this, it would rank in time to be a relevant organic result. Yankee Candle does a great job of this. If you do a Google search for Yankee Candle you’ll see that they have the top organic rank, and then have an ad for their current sale.
The Cons of Pay-Per-Click Advertising
- You’re paying for your traffic. Paying for clicks is like renting an apartment. Once you stop paying for your ads, you stop getting the traffic.
- It can get expensive. If you don’t manage your ad campaigns correctly, you can quickly find yourself spending a large amount of money for traffic that may, or may not, be qualified for your business. Plus, there is always there threat of click-fraud, where someone (maybe a competitor) keeps clicking on your ad to either spend your money or exhaust or allocated daily budget, allowing them to rank.
- There isn’t that much traffic from PPC. Over 75% of searchers never click on sponsored links. This means that even though your ad will appear for your choice search term, only 1-in-4 people will actually click on it.
If you weight the costs & benefits of using PPC, and implement your campaigns strategically, it can be a beneficial part of your online marketing mix. But, it’s easy to get started: just create a Google AdWords account, and your off to the races. Beyond Google, plenty of search engines & social networking have PPC systems (Facebook’s allows you to add an image, which is great for getting your logo in front of eyeballs). If you truly want to get involved in PPC, here are a few good links:
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