My last NetProfit, explaining why SEO should be the foundation of your online marketing strategy, prompted a response from Evan Britton, Product Manager of Register.com. It’s been Evan’s experience that SEO can be a waste of time because of the lack of control you have over the engines. While Evan and I don’t agree on some points, especially about SEO, he did make some excellent observations about PPC and there’s always room for another opinion. So this time in NetProfit I’ll sit back and let Evan take the reins.

Submit and move on….by Evan Britton

Online marketing is all about results.  If you can't track results, then your money and --more importantly -- your time should be spent elsewhere.  By tracking results from a search engine marketing campaign, you can build up a knowledge base with respect to your business, including which messages perform the best, which search terms have the best conversion rates, and what destination URL is best for specific users to land on.  Over time, this knowledge can help you to improve and define your business.  

Tracking also allows you to understand your ROI from a specific marketing initiative and gives you confidence to spend money and drive volume.  You may have thought that spending $10,000 a month on a search engine is way out of your budget, but once you're aware of your ROI, you may realize that you have no limit at all. 

Pay per click (PPC) search engines give you the ability to have complete control over your search traffic.  Search engine optimization, on the other hand, does not put you in the drivers seat.   Companies often spend hours tweaking meta tags, building doorway and re-direct pages, removing JavaScript code, and constantly monitoring the search engines to track their rankings.  At the end of the day, these companies are right back where they started from and their time would have been better spent on launching and perfecting PPC search buys.  As we look to tomorrow, PPC will continue to grow.  The reality of the search marketplace is three fold, and each of these realities is a reason why you should be focusing in on PPC.

 A) All of the major portals are looking to make money. 

Excite.com went bankrupt, and Iwon subsequently bought them for $10 million dollars.  Why did Iwon shell out all of that cash? Because Excite.com had search traffic and search traffic is tremendously valuable. 

Check out Alta Vista, which just launched a new design.  They are now displaying 7 Overture listings and 0 Alta Vista listings above the fold.  Go to Lycos, and you'll see 3 Overture listings and 3 Lycos paid listings above the fold.  Visit MSN, you will see paid listings that they sold internally, followed by listings from their network, followed by 3 Overture listings.  You have to do a lot of page searching before you can find MSN’s unbiased results. 

The fact of the matter is that online advertisers want search traffic and the companies with the searches want to make their advertisers happy.  Paid search listings will continue to command more and more real estate on search results pages across the web.

B) Paid listings are becoming more and more relevant. 

Why would a user click on a paid result when they could be clicking on an unpaid (unbiased) result?   All searchers want is relevant results.  They want to visit a site that will give them what they are looking for.  When Internet users are searching for information, I do believe that they will seek unpaid results.  These searchers don't want to land on a site that attempts to make money off of them, they want to land on a site that will inform them.

On the other hand, when a user is searching for a product or service, they are looking to buy.  A relevant paid result is often exactly what these searchers are looking for.  Generally, the company with the product that has the best conversion rate can afford to pay the most for search traffic.  Therefore, the most relevant products often rise to the top of paid search results.  Moreover, either Overture, MSN, or Google’s “stingy” editorial department edits each paid listing, so it is likely that you will get a relevant product or service when clicking on a paid result.

C) Google controls over 80% of the unpaid search results across the web. 

To get your site into Google, you need to first submit it, and then have a quality site with other relevant sites linking to you.  You can optimize your site all day long, but if relevant sites are linking to your competitor, then your competitor will have a higher page rank and they will show up before you in Google. 

As for the other search engines out there -- the Inktomi, Fast, AltaVista, and Teoma’s of the world -- they have an annual inclusion fee that you can pay.  This one time cost may or may not be a waste of money, but it is certainly a waste of time when trying to optimize your site for these search engines.

Visit this URL to submit your site to Google.

http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Once you've completed the free Google submission, you can stop worrying about your rankings, they're not going to change overnight.  Your PPC campaign, on the other hand, could quite possibly be driving new customers to your site by morning.

Last Word

Evan does echo the frustration we often hear about lack of control or ROI accountability in SEO. That’s one reason we’ve developed the Traffic program, which does allow you to directly compare the ROI from your SEO campaign to that of your PPC campaign. For a recap of my other reasons why you shouldn’t abandon traditional SEO, see the last NetProfit.