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Organic vs Paid Search Marketing - The Pros and Cons

Guest post by: Christine Slocumb

Article Overview: Wondering whether you should pursue paid search marketing campaigns, organic search campaigns or both for your business? Here is a high-level comparison of the two online marketing strategies.

Organic vs Paid Search Marketing - The Pros and Cons

Wondering whether you should pursue paid search campaigns, organic search campaigns or both for your business? Here is a high-level comparison of the 2 search strategies.

Paid Search

How it Works: Paid search is also referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC) or sponsored search advertising. Popular examples of PPC are Microsoft AdCenter (Bing) and Google AdWords. Facebook and LinkedIn sponsored ads are also gaining traction. In this type of search marketing campaign, companies pay to have their ad included on the search engine results pages for particular keywords. Every time someone clicks on the link in your ad, you must pay Google a predetermined rate, called the Cost Per Click (CPC). The position of your ad depends on several factors including the CPC you set and the quality score Google’s algorithm assigns.

Pros: Using paid search guarantees placement of your ads on the first page of search page results for designated keywords.

Cons: Because the CPC increases for competitive keywords, paid search can be very expensive. It’s also easy to setup campaigns incorrectly if you are not familiar with the different PPC systems. For example Adwords and Adcenter have different ways of specifying networks on which your ads show. Depending on the keywords you want to appear and the competition you face, you may need a very large budget devoted to paid search in order for it to be effective in generating leads.

Organic Search

How it Works: Organic search engine optimization encompasses an extensive amount of strategic marketing and analytics. A high page quality score is given to sites that include the keyword or key phrase in specific places in the code, have a specific keyphrase density, have cross links from other internal pages pointing to it and has high quality external sites linking to the page (often called backlinks).

Pros: The best reason to use an organic search strategy is that it’s free! You do not pay when people click on your search results. Organic results also get much higher traffic volumes and are perceived as more trustworthy and of greater quality than PPC advertisements.

Cons: Attaining a first page ranking is a long and often difficult process. While PPC is an expensive sprint, organic marketing is a patience-testing marathon. While there is no direct financial cost, you must be willing to devote a lot of time to developing a successful organic SEO campaign. And yes, time is money.

If you hire a search agency to manage your organic search rankings, beware of black hat SEO quick tricks. Some marketing “professionals” will use these unethical tactics to get you ranked highly, but it is only a matter of time before Google will penalize your site delisting it entirely. Then it’s very time consuming to regain your former rankings.

Summary

Both strategies have strengths and weaknesses. Each can be used effectively to build a successful search engine optimization campaign. In fact, they work very well in conjunction with one another in the hands of experienced online marketing agency. You must determine if paid search, organic search, or a combination of the two is right for your business based on your budget, time allotment, and overall marketing goals.

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Article Tags: online marketing, organic search, paid search, web marketing



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Re: Google Places Review | How to Get a Review on Google Places? - Hi Evan, Yes, I am planning more. I have multiple videos coming out this year on: Social media marketing Email marketing Lead Generation Organic search marketing Conversion rate optimization Analytics Content marketing Paid search marketing I am looking for SEO / Internet Marketing questions people have. I enjoy producing videos answer tuff SEO questions. Let me know if you are any of your members have any they want answered. Jeff
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Re: Let’s talk about the ways of marketing your products, servic - I agree with some of the others who responded it depends on what your selling... but to answer your questions here are some of the methods I use. Forum Marketing Yahoo Answers (I need to use more of) SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Bum Marketing or Article marketing P-P-C (Pay Per Click) Marketing Online Directories Hope this helps.


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