Good design is, well, good design. This means that a site is easy to navigate, with relevant and congruent content that makes users view multiple pages, spend more time on the site, and hopefully produce the desired out come (a conversion metric such as – a purchase, phone call, leaving a comment, etc) while differentiating its self from the competition, if necessary.

Well executed search engine optimization will ensure proper messaging when being indexed by search engines. This means that the messaging of the site (a product of good design) will match how the site is read by the search engines and then ranked in order by keywords. Once design and SEO is in place only then should proper Pay Per Click advertising tactics should be used.

When all three elements come together this is what a search experience should look like:

1. An internet user types in a the keyword that is targeted by both PPC and SEO
2. The ranking of the site appears in both the organic and paid search listings of the search results page, thus increasing the chance of a click through.
3. With good design, the user finds what they are looking for and a conversion metric is triggered
4. Search engines reward the PPC advertiser because the high relevancy with lower cost per click and higher ranking

PPC rocks but it isn’t the end-all be-all that so many people incorrectly believe it to be. SEO, design AND PPC are all required for the most effective online branding strategy.

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PPC Rocks! Well Kinda…

Several of our clients, at one time managed their own PPC accounts but turned them over to us because when you get into it the following concepts can be rather difficult to get right:

Bid Management: Knowing how much to buy keywords for, on what engines and when to run the ads.

Keyword Research: Which keywords to buy, which keywords trigger a success event, (for example someone buying a product on a website) and knowing which keywords to eliminate.

Copy Writing: What do you write in your ads? Often there very tight limitations to what an advertiser can write. Google limits its ads to 95 characters including spaces; also there are strict limitations on what can be said, also know as editorial guidelines.

This is just scratching the surface of what PPC is and what it takes to run an effective campaign. The internet is a living, breathing, thing and PPC campaigns need to be constantly adjusted, tested, and optimized to get the highest return.

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What is Pay Per Click Advertising?