Pay Per Click vs. Organic Search Engine Marketing

            Many will not disagree that search engines are powerful tools when it comes to marketing a product or service.  With the Yellow pages and print media dying out, along with the economy taking a toll on marketing budgets for companies, search engines are providing a newer, increasingly popular and cheaper way for businesses to advertise themselves.  There are two main methods of search engine marketing that come to mind when a person thinks of search engine marketing; pay per click and organic search.  Organic search is the naturally occurring search engine results seen when you “Google” a topic or type it in a search engine box of other popular search engines like Yahoo and Bing.  Pay Per Click marketing consists of the paid advertisements seen usually on the right hand corner of the screen vs. the center or as already stated “organic” section of a search engine.

            Pay Per Click has many advantages but the disadvantages are certainly noticeable.  For instance, it was noted in 2008 that only 20% of all clicks made after a search engine search was performed went to the sponsored or “pay per click” ads.  The other 80% went to the organic.  Also the trust factor played an issue as many consumers saw the paid advertisements as “not very trustworthy” being as the companies or website owners were paying to be there, and weren’t considered the top chosen websites the search engine picked naturally.  Not to mention, organic clicks are free where as a person using a pay per click campaign has to pay every time a visitor or searcher clicks on the ad.

            Pay Per Click wouldn’t be successful if it didn’t have any advantages, for instance; achieving organic search engine listings can be very tedious and time consuming just to get recognized for one keyword or phrase.  It could take months and some search engine placement companies, otherwise known as “Search Engine Optimizers” can charge thousands of dollars to get a website recognized organically for certain keywords and not even guarantee results.  Pay Per click bypasses this process by getting the keyword or phrase immediately recognized on the search engine page and for as many keywords and phrases as a person wishes.  An individual using a website to get natural organic listings may find themselves competing with thousands of other websites and not even get first page results for keywords and phrases that actually matter or are being searched for, simply because their spots are limited and already taken.

            There’s no doubt, however, that over time achieving first page results for a commonly searched keyword or phrase can make a company or individual entrepreneur a lot of money along with saving them a lot of money on pay per click costs simply because they don’t have to pay Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine any capital when an individual clicks their link.  Some companies being recognized for just one keyword have seen online sales quadruple or multiply even more simply by a popular search engine choosing to recognize their site. 

Depending on what type of business you’re running, geographic targeting can be a major player when it comes to search engine marketing.  The organic listings geographic targeting options can be very limited.  For instance, a car mechanic shop owner would probably like to tell surrounding towns that he or she exists via search engines, but only comes up organically in Google and Bing maps for the town the shop’s located in.  The shop owner could take the website representing the shop and attempt to optimize it for surrounding towns, waiting months for the search engines to recognize the new changes to the site, or just run a cheap pay per click campaign and tell it to only run geographically in the towns or areas the owner would like to serve.  There are dozens of townships and municipality’s within an area and optimizing a web page for all of them would be time consuming and costly if the business or website owner’s not computer savvy in search engine optimization, which many aren’t.

            This is why using Pay Per Click can provide an effective way to geo target the areas capable of being served without taking a lot of time and effort to do so.

            Overall despite the many advantages of using Pay Per Click having a website recognized for organic listings will probably up to this point be the most effective way of driving traffic and potential consumers to a persons website, unfortunately it’s just not very easy to do so.  Luckily Pay Per Click exists to provide a quicker solution to such a dilemma.