Paid Submission (PPC)

Pay per click

Pay per click or PPC is a paid sort of advertising. This has become popular majorly due to the search engine GoTo, also called as Overture. The business is placed near the top of the search results page. Depending on the click, the bidding is done. When the engine sends the company a visitor, the company pays a certain amount to the engine. Google has started a version similar to PPC called as AdWords Select.

Advantages

PPC campaigns enjoy some advantages over traditional SEO’s. There are no changes made to a current site’s look or content to obtain a higher rank. Only there must be a willingness to pay a certain amount to avail of this service. A PPC campaign is implemented fast and only a few minutes are necessary to get traffic on one’s site. On the other hand, a standard SEO requires several months to get traffic. Lastly, the implementation of a PPC campaign is easy and does not need any specialized knowledge as an SEO campaign needs. Also the knowledge of search engine marketing and keyword research is an added advantage.

Disadvantages

New higher bids can decrease the positions of other firms. To react to these changes, many companies raise their bids to have a previous ranking. In this way, the handling of positions becomes crucial. The competitiveness of the keyword phrases and the aggressiveness of the competition make this PPC campaign very expensive. Some savvy search engine users recognize PPC results as paid advertising hence they bypass them without considering the benefits.

The success of a PPC campaign is decided by finding the cost of the website visitor. If the cost is $50 and the sale made is $40, then the campaign can be considered as a failure. The elementary form of the formula is as follows – for a specific period, the profit from the website is divided by the number of total visitors. Thus, if a site gained $1000 profit from goods and services and there were 2000 visitors, then each visitor would be worth 50 cents. Thus, the optimum price to run a PPC would be less than 50 cents and this depends on the profit margin. Less money is bid on less popular terms so that an acceptable amount is paid per visitor.

The success of a PPC campaign depends on the keyword research. The difference from typical SEO optimization is that the number of phrases to target has no practical limits. The number of keyword phrases can also be added at no extra cost. Due to this the keyword selection process becomes easier. The reason is that there aren’t many resources committed to optimize a site for a specific keyword set. Keywords that under perform do not cost extra money.