When PayPerClick (AdWords) is better than SEO

It’s difficult to justify a long term SEO strategy to someone when their boss is breathing down their neck, demanding to see improved traffic at next week’s meeting. You may recall that we dedicated a previous post to how PPC is, in the long run, a waste of money. While we still hold to that, the truth is the fastest way to get more traffic is to pay for it, so using AdWords as a supplement to your SEO efforts is a good idea in certain situations. Let’s look at how to make a smart campaign using AdWords when the need arises. 

Too often, companies run costly AdWords campaigns with a huge list of keywords that all point to the same landing page. This results in lots of traffic to that one page, but that page may not be relevant to the visitor. The main goal for a successful PPC campaign is to make sure everyone who clicks one of your ads will be satisfied with the results they get, and that result needs to be tailored for each individual keyword. 

For example, if someone Google’s “parts for a ’65 Ford Mustang” and they see your Google Ad, it should link to a page about ’65 Ford Mustangs and not to the homepage of a site about cars. If you can direct a visitor to the exact information they’re looking for, odds are they will stay longer, visit more pages and buy more items.

People searching don’t care about your homepage or promotion for your products. If they don’t get the results they’re looking for, they will leave right away. Which means you are paying for a click with absolutely no value. 

So when exactly should you use PPC? There are a number reasons a short term traffic boost can be worth paying for, but three stand out:

When you are launching a new product
It’s extremely difficult to get a new product on Google’s first page right away if there’s any competition to speak of. Adding a couple of smart ads can help you get the message out quickly.

When you launch a new website
This is the biggest time to use PPC. A new domain and a new website are always hard to compete with for Google spots. You have no links and no strength in your domain. Even with the best on-page SEO, it will take time for Google to categorize your site by keywords and search phrases. Put up some ads and hopefully people will like your website enough to add some links to it, giving you extra traffic you don’t have to pay for and strengthening your site's SEO. 

When you are fighting for extremely competitive keywords
This one is both difficult and expensive. But to get heaps of traffic, you need to hit some of the big keywords. If you get people to your website on a search like “cars” and they like what they see, they will surely come back. And hopefully they will tell their friends about the cool website they found. Getting your ads onto that results page won’t come cheap, but the payoff may be well worth it.

We always recommend SEO over PPC, but having ads on Google can be an effective supplement while you’re trying to climb the organic search results. Keep perspective by bearing in mind that while 90% of Googlers ignore the ads, companies still spend 90% of their search engine marketing budget on them. 

The best solution for you may well be adding the expertise to do both. That way, your expert can decide how much should go to SEO and how much should be spent on PPC. And once the SEO starts to attract huge amounts of traffic, scale back the PayPerClick budget till it’s all organic traffic. After all, you shouldn’t have to pay each person to visit your site. The content should be all the incentive they need.

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