There are various methods to generate traffic to a website, but which is the most cost-effective solution for your business?
PPC Management or SEO?
Some traffic-building methods include – PPC management services (pay per click management), SEO (search engine optimization), article marketing, content creation and RSS syndication, using social media engagement, acquiring editorial links from industry specific authority sites, utilizing press releases (to generate a buzz) and even using online niche directories can be leveraged to facilitate traffic.
The purpose of acquiring new traffic is to segment users into the appropriate sales funnel where prospects can convert into customers.
Implementing a robust online marketing campaign involves understanding the various sales funnels that exist and which represent the most lucrative return on investment.
When the topic of budget and campaign scope are introduced, we suggest weening your website off PPC and segueing keywords into organic search engine optimization to reap the long-term benefits of SEO.
PPC and PPC Management Services are often viewed as a solution to drive traffic into a conversion funnel. But how much money are you leaving on the table from not assessing the barrier to entry for acquiring organic positions for the bulk of the keyword clusters you bid on?
If you are spending more than $2,000 per month on PPC, then your website is a likely candidate for SEO. The reason I use that benchmark is, proper SEO is a legitimate costs and requires:
- Analysis time to perform sweeps and identify critical errors
- Time to provision/implement site wide changes
- Costs for content creation and internal linking
- Time to promote the site off page for link building
- Time to measure and assess which metrics are yielding sufficient results
Anything less than $2K per month (to hire a team) to dedicate to this purpose is nearly counter-productive, due to the management time it requires to provide oversight and structure as well as the level of commitment required to offset your competition.
We have client who spent $25K per week on dominating their market, and sure, while their traffic levels were engaging and profitable, they are tied to the PPC model like a crutch that whenever the cash flow stops, so does the traffic. There is no need to be utterly dependent on one lead generation or traffic generation model.
I am not against PPC, it is a necessary component for some business models. However, many of the same keywords targeted within a PPC management campaign could be optimized for a fraction of the cost organically.
Going back to the assessment about that client referred to above, they now enjoy thousands of stemmed keyword variations from leveraging the on page power they had pent up within the site, that was freed up as a result of refining the site architecture, content and internal linking.
The premise is, before you throw money at PPC in an attempt to blanket a market, assess the conversion funnel and the psychology of the motivated buyers who would respond to your offer.
Then, create topical nodes of relevance within your website by incorporating a content management system to produce buoyancy for those specific keyword variations while using the keyword-rich internal links to build internal prominence for specific landing pages.
The next phase involves building links, creating a buzz with press releases or syndicating content to get traction. Even though this might take time to see the results, the benefits are astounding after a site has had the chance to build momentum for a few months.
While every website is different, eventually with this tactic (targeting multiple keyword clusters and nodes of the root phrase) a website will start to ascend up the keyword food chain and start impacting the SERPs (search engine result pages).
If you still elect to use PPC (pay per click) marketing at that time, you can easily (a) lower your cost per click via PPC bid and (b) gain organic rankings to supplant your websites appearance for related keywords (both broad and exact match) based on the structure of the content, internal links and page reputation.
Couldn’t have said it better myself! It’s not enough to just incorporate PPC advertising into your business. The site and its functionality must be running smoothly for it to have any effect. Too many people don’t take this into consideration and could be throwing away their money.