What’s Best – SEO or Paid Search? This is a very common question we get to hear from marketers and is a subject I spoke on recently when the New Zealand Marketing Association ran one of their bi-monthly ‘Brainy Breakfast’ seminars. The seminar was about Search Marketing and a sell out. Despite an antisocial 7am start more than 230 marketing professionals from a wide range of NZ organisations attended, demonstrating the intense interest in search marketing. Is search marketing taking off in New Zealand? Absolutely!

I was one of the six presenters on the panel which also included Google New Zealand, Yahoo! Australia, plus several other search marketing specialists. (That’s me, 3rd from the left).

We all spoke about different aspects of search marketing & the specific topic I covered was “What’s Best – SEO or Paid Search?” Because of the interest I’ve decided I to cover off the presentation here.

The short answer to the question is…it depends on your objectives & situation. Both SEO & Paid Search are
incredibly effective methods for driving more customers to your website. Like all things they each have their pros & cons and understanding these will help you decide which to use.

It’s easiest to start off looking at Paid Search. That’s because fundamentally it’s media buying, so most marketers find it easier to grasp than search engine optimisation.

Paid Search (PPC) Pros:

1. Performance based – a key aspect about paid search marketing which makes it so appealing to marketers is that, unlike almost all other advertising, it’s performance based. With PPC if people don’t click on your ads you don’t pay. And not only that, when people do click on your ad they’re actively seeking you out. What a contrast to traditional interruption based media! No wonder so much advertising spend is being switched to paid search.
2. Speed of implementation – compared to SEO it’s much quicker to implement a paid search campaign and few, if any, site changes are needed (at least initially). This makes it much easier for marketers to commit to because they can comfortably put a toe in the water & retain control without it becoming a major project involving IT etc.
3. High Control – this is another appealing aspect of paid search.

• On demand. Campaigns can be turned on & off as desired (ideal for tactical purposes)
• Landing pages – you control which specific page your ad links to.
• Specific audiences can be targeted using geo-targeting so your ads are not viewed & clicked on by audiences you can’t serve
• Compared to organic search results the advertiser controls the message presented in the search results i.e. the ad copy messaging (within editorial bounds)
• The keywords triggering your ads (if you’re selling widgets & don’t want a particular keyword to trigger your ads, such as ‘free widgets’ then you simply don’t include that in the keywords being bid on &/or make it a negative keyword)

This control is illustrated here (Ferrit is NZ’s biggest online shopping site with over 80 retailers):

In addition, less obvious benefits that paid search offers is testing.

With paid search you can & should test all of the following:

1. Keywords – with SEO a page can only be effectively optimised for 1 or 2 closely related keywords. However with paid search you can literally target thousands of different keywords in a campaign. So one of the things we always recommend is using paid search as a keyword validation tool to quickly identify the most effective keywords (i.e. the ‘money’ keywords that bring traffic that converts). Those are the keywords that the site should then be optimised for.
2. Ad copy – with paid search it’s easy to split test ads to find out which generate the greatest response from both a click through rate & more importantly, conversion rate. If you’re a company renting out motorhomes should your ad headline be “New Zealand Motorhomes” or “New Zealand Campervans’? With split testing you’ll know with certainty which appeals to your prospective audience, rather than guessing. (By the way, depending on the market being targeted one of those terms way out performs the other).
3. Landing page testing – again as with ad copy split testing you can test different landing pages to see which has the greatest impact on conversions. Simply A/B split testing can be done, as well as sophisticated multi-variate testing where a range of different factors get tested (eg 3 different headlines + 2 guarantees + 2 different prices + 3 different ‘buy now’ buttons). With most websites having dismal conversion rates in the 2% region using conversion optimisation to improve conversion rates can have a massively positive impact on your bottom line.

As you can see there are many compelling reason for using paid search. But it’s not all upside, there are a few cons.

Paid Search Cons:

The biggest negative is that paid search only works whilst you’re able to keep putting money in the PPC machine. Stop, and of course your ads stop running.

Fundamentally PPC is an auction and with increasing competition as more advertisers enter the market bid costs are increasing. NZ still an immature market with low competition but ‘keyword inflation’ is begining to happen which is a reason to get in early now. In the US paid search growth is starting to slow as many smaller to medium sized advertisers are having to cut back on PPC because bid prices are getting too expensive. This means it’s critically important to understand what you can afford to spend and having smart bid management strategies becomes increasingly important as CPC increases.

OK, to avoid this being too long an article we’ll take a break here. Tomorrow we’ll switch gears and look at the pros & cons of Search Engine Optimisation.

See you then.

Mark Sceats

In my previous post “Why You Need To Market Your Website” I mentioned the Web contains literally billions of web pages and millions more are added daily. Just how many is unclear.

Well a couple of days ago Google stated that their systems which process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone, recognising 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs! Note the word unique.

They go on to say “we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.”

What blows me away in particular is Google’s estimate that several billion pages each day are added. That’s just mind boggling & shows the growing level of competition.

To put this in context. The first Google index in 1998 had 26 million pages & by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. In my previous post I mentioned a study released in 2000 estimated 7.3 million unique pages were being added daily. I went on to say that given the huge growth of the web since 2000 & boom in blogging it’s likely the figure is now very much higher. Well I was right, but I’m still astounded at Google’s estimate. (I don’t dispute it – I just have difficulty counting that high ).

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? Google themselves say “we don’t know & strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite with things like web calendars may have a ‘next day’ link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a ‘new’ page. We’re not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what’s a useful page, and there is no exact answer.”

Let’s just agree there’s a lot & the number’s growing. Which means ranking well in search engine results is going to be more important than ever and more challenging to achieve.

Mark Sceats

Search engine marketing is the most powerful online customer acquisition strategy available to marketers today. More & more businesses are diverting funds from online banner advertising into search engine marketing because it’s cheaper & generates more sales.

If search engine marketing is not currently part of your marketing then chances are you’re giving your competitors a big opportunity.

Search engine marketing fits within the promotional mix of a marketing plan and is all about using Internet search engines to deliver targeted traffic to web sites.

The term “website traffic” is a bit abstract – what we’re really talking about here are visitors. More to the point, attracting prospective customers interested in whatever it is your website offers.

Search engine marketing has become increasingly complex and sophisticated. Today it involves much more than simply optimising page code. This is why the term “search engine marketing” or SEM has been coined. It encompasses all promotional activities involving search engines. This included search engine optimisation (SEO), paid search (PPC), search reputation management, and more. The simple diagram to the right shows the key components of search engine marketing.

However to confuse matters the term SEM is frequently used as an acronym to distinguish paid search from search engine optimisation or SEO.

Semantics aside, here’s what Search Engine Marketing is not…

1) “Search engine marketing is just about getting high rankings in the search engines”

Yes, high rankings in search engines are essential so your site can be found. But search engine rankings by themselves are not the end goal. They’re simply a necessary step to achieving it. High rankings in search engines are worthless unless they deliver visitors to a website. (Blindingly obvious, but missed by so many)

In this regard search engine rankings are like newspaper advertisements or billboards – their success is not measured by how many there are, but by the responses they generate.

2) “Search engine marketing is simply about driving increased traffic to your website from search engines”

It’s relatively easy to get vast amounts of traffic to a website, but if traffic just clicks in and clicks out again what’s the point? That’s like having lots of foot traffic go through a store but few stopping to shop. Tyre kickers don’t help your business.

What does help is getting more of the right sort of traffic. And that’s visitors who convert. In other words focus should be on traffic quality - not just quantity.

Done right, search engine marketing will deliver:

• Visitors actively searching for the products or services you offer

• Visitors wanting to buy

Exactly the sort of visitors you want visiting your website!

Mark Sceats

A common mistake made by businesses both big and small is to spend all their budget developing a website and then only consider online promotion as an after thought, (if at all).

Big mistake!

Web marketing is essential, but something that frequently gets overlooked.

Websites are without question a highly effective marketing medium. But to work they need visitors!

Without visitors your website will be like having a TV commercial produced and then never shown on TV. Or brochures printed but not distributed to customers. Clearly to do so would be a waste of money – and yet so many businesses effectively do this very thing with their websites.

No matter how good a website may be or how much money is spent on design and development, it will still be just one of many millions competing for attention on the World Wide Web. Adopting a “Build it & they’ll come” mentality is naive and wishful thinking that simply won’t cut it in these fiercely competitive times.

The Web contains literally billions of web pages and millions more are added daily. [Just how many is not clear, however a study released way back in July 2000 by business intelligence company Cyveillance estimated that 7.3 million unique pages were being added daily. Given the huge growth of the web since 2000 & boom in blogging it's likely the figure is now very much higher. And that means the competition to stand out is even greater].

The vast size of the Web means that simply creating a website and publishing it on the Web does not guarantee your desired audience will find it. If ever the analogy of finding a needle in a haystack applied, then this is it!

So how do you ensure your website gets found?

To break through the clutter and get visibility it’s essential that traffic is driven to a website.

This can be achieved through a variety of off-line and on-line marketing techniques, (ideally in a combined and integrated manner).

When budgeting for your website you need to consider more than just its development costs. Basically there are 3 broad cost areas that should be budgeted for. These are:

1. The initial cost of developing the site;
2. Ongoing maintenance and hosting costs;
3. And last but not least, a budget for actively marketing your website.

Just how much to budget will depend on your specific requirements and the depths of your pockets.

Some US Fortune 500 companies who spend millions on developing websites allocate around 25% of their budget on development, 25% on maintenance/hosting and 50% on website promotion. In NZ significantly smaller proportions of website budgets are allocated to website promotion, however this is changing as smart marketers realise the competitive advantage they can gain.

The key point is don’t spend all your budget developing the site and have nothing left for marketing it.

In future postings we’ll discuss specific ways of promoting your website and driving traffic to it.

Mark Sceats