The Natural Balance of Things
So you’ve been working on running a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) online marketing campaign for a while now and you’re satisfied with the return on investment you are seeing. The powers that be are pleased as well and have allocated more budget for online marketing. This leaves you with the question: Spend more on PPC that is performing well or launch a Natural Search Engine Optimization project to complement the PPC campaign?
In online marketing circles, there’s a lot of talk about using both PPC and Natural to run a balanced marketing campaign, but what does that really mean? Let’s look at a couple of examples.
There’s Gold At The End Of That Widget
Let’s say you are in the widget business. You sell widgets of many shapes and sizes. Through PPC, you are able to do pretty well on big ticket widgets. You sell gold widgets all day long. It’s the gold-plated widgets that are hard to move, though. And that’s a shame because, even though you only carry three types of gold-plated widgets, the profit margin is fantastic.
Your PPC manager has been running ads for these gold-plated widgets. And while many people look, it’s not generating enough sales to justify the effort. These gold-plated widgets, however, may be perfect to include in a Natural optimization project.
Establishing a visible presence in search engine web results for the term “gold-plated widgets” allows your company to maintain traffic to the site when people are looking for gold-plated widgets, only this time, if someone comes to the site through search engine result listings, it doesn’t cost you per visit. This allows you another way to place focus on that high-profit item without having to worry so much about it converting at a certain rate.
Competitive Market And Low Profit Margin
You’ve worked hard to build the brand reputation of Widgets R Us and create an awareness of your widgets. And since your business operates in a competitive widget market, that’s a good thing. In fact, your name is so well recognized that affiliates and resellers are also bidding on your brand name, because bidding on other keywords related to your industry can cost a fortune! After all, if your widget sells for $40 and it costs $8 every time someone clicks on one of your non-branded industry keywords, you’d have to make a sale on 1 out of every 5 clicks just to break even!
Those industry terms that cost more in a PPC campaign could be ideal for a Natural Search Engine Optimization project. By creating a presence in natural search results, you can continue to run the really successful branded PPC campaign that leverages your brand name, and complement it with a Natural project that helps your site get traffic on those non-branded terms that are so important in building your business, and building upon your brand identity online.
Balance In All Things
The above scenarios are just two of the most common reasons you would want to complement a PPC campaign with a Natural Search Engine Optimization campaign. If you find yourself in a predicament with your PPC campaign where you are limited by either cost, conversion rates, or traffic, it’s probably time to find balance, the Natural way.
