On the Internet, you have two major ways of advertising yourself. You can opt for pay-per-click (PPC) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Each has its benefits, but you can’t concentrate on both at the same time. Unless you’re a huge corporation with an unlimited marketing budget, you need to pick one option and concentrate on it.
Before picking an option and eagerly attempting to make it into a success, ask yourself these five questions. They’re designed to help you question your decisions and to ensure you’ve made the right one.
1. How Much Money Do I Have?
Your marketing budget is an important factor in your decision. You can do well with SEO without spending a cent. To do well with PPC you need money. If you want to place your banners on Google for competitive keywords it’s going to cost you. Sparse budgets should stick to SEO for the time being.
There’s nothing wrong with steadily transitioning into PPC as revenues begin to roll in.
2. Do I Know What I’m Doing?
Obviously, you need to have some grasp of what you’re doing to get started. SEO requires a rudimentary knowledge of the way the web works, at the most basic level. PPC has a fairly steep learning curve. It’s easy to get it wrong and lose money in the process.
Review a few tutorials and consider whether you’re really ready to tackle PPC. In general, you should either have participated in a successful campaign before or have the advantage of having a PPC expert onboard.
2. What are the Average CPCs for my Industry?
CPC stands for cost-per-click. Whenever someone clicks your sponsored banner ad, you pay a fee. If you’re in a highly competitive industry, such as auto insurance, you can find yourself paying over $20 for every click on the keyword ‘auto insurance’. Clearly, this isn’t worth it and it’s far beyond the means of most web owners.
You can find the average CPCs by simply looking into the PPC system and attempting to sign up for a keyword. You’ll get the exact price for each keyword.
4. How Competitive are my SERPs?
Determine how much competition you will have for your targeted keywords. The Google External Keyword Research Tool can help you out with it; this is only an estimate, though. You can use all of this data to decide whether you’ll have a chance of ranking highly. More competitive keywords won’t work because you’ll have to compete with large corporations and huge marketing budgets.
Opt for PPC for high-competition keywords as you have little chance of making any gains with standard SEO.
5. How Much Time Do I Have?
Some sites need to start making money right now. For webmasters who have no time to wait for results, go for PPC. It only takes a few days for it to start making money. Good SEO takes months of trial and error. Even the most proficient SEO consultants can find themselves having to try multiple strategies before they start seeing any noticeable results.