Stuart Henderson, a Canadian-based historian, rightly points out - doing business without proper advertisements is the same as winking at a girl in the dark. Only you know what you‘ve done, others don’t.
When it comes to Internet marketing, the goal is to achieve a decent position in the search engine for specific keywords. In other words, when customers online, search for a specific keywords or phrases, you would want them to be landing on your website. This can be achieved by some smart SEO work that will rank your website on the first page of a search engine.
The PPC or Pay Per Click is one method introduced by Google for ranking your website. As a matter of fact, everything is not green about the PPC advertising. This method has its own merits and demerits as pointed out below.
Advantages and Disadvantages of PPC
• PPC works faster than any other conventional methods. It can bring in visitors to your website in a matter of hours.
• Maximizes your traffic: Bloggers and website owners develop their sites by publishing the text ads along with other affiliate programs. Your advertisement will be posted online and will reach millions of visitors within a week or month depending on your everyday budget.
• The Trust Factor: When you use the organic SEO method to develop your website, you may never be sure of a great position in the search engine. It does not matter even if you have the world’s best contents in your website, it still may not prove its worth if your SEO is done badly. Your competitors are paying heavy on PPC and the search engine will bring up several other websites that are in the same niche as yours.
• The Stability Factor: Billions of websites try to make it big by fighting for a position on the search engine’s top page. To achieve this, a lot of shortcut techniques are attempted to cheat or beat the search engine rules. When these attempts fail, websites are penalized sometimes to the extent of not being indexed. But this is not the same in the case of Pay Per Click method. As long as you are paying, you will be safe and will continue to top the search engine results.
As mentioned earlier, everything is not clean about the PPC advertising.
• The Cost Factor: Pay Per Click can prove to be very costly. It works by making online visitors click on advertisements. Such clicks can be very expensive and new users might be charged more.
• Click Fraud: A popular search engine terminology you might have come across many times, happens in the case of PPC or text ads. Some publishers will click ads on their own websites in an attempt to make more money, while others will get their friends and families to do it. This may result in users being banned from the company.
• Results of accidental clicks: Accidently clicking on ads can also grab your money. Lots of visitors assume that text ads are part of the actual website and click on them. On realizing their mistake, they immediately close the window without paying attention to it. Hence you would be losing money without gaining a new reader or customer.
• In spite of paying PPC heavily, there is no guarantee that you will make money through the accrued clicks. Every click may not really translate into sales.
• As there are number of large companies with big budgets making use of the PPC service, it has become very competitive and difficult for small and medium business owners.
To sum up, PPC is a great tool for advertising but one has to do their homework before using it. Traffic analysis, search volume and many other key indicators are to be studied in detail. As the saying goes - success is a ladder that cannot be climbed with your hands in the pocket.
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