This is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay per Click (PPC) techniques are important, as they drive traffic to your website. What are SEO and PPC and how exactly do they help your business? Let’s take SEO first.

SEO

The internet first became a mass medium in the mid 1990s. Companies realised that as the internet became more popular, more and more lucrative revenue streams would become available to companies with a web presence. At this time pioneer search engines such as Northern Light and AltaVista first started to become common tools to search the net. These and other search engines developed more and more elaborate methods to index the ever-growing web.

Site owners realised that if their site ranked higher in a search engines for a specific search, they would have a better chance of bringing traffic to that site. They therefore used the algorithms used by the search engines to persuade the engines that they were the most relevant site for a particular term, and should therefore appear higher in the results pages for that search. As the algorithms changed, so the optimisers changed the code of their site and developed external strategies so that search engines would continue to send traffic their way.

SEO can be separated into two separate areas of work which can be boiled down to onsite and offsite factors. Onsite factors include work on structure, navigation, copy, title and other coding tags and tweaks. Offsite factors that are considered part of most campaigns include linking to appropriate sites, Directory and portal submission, Web PR releases and more. Nowadays many sites find that SEO brings them approximately 70% of their traffic.

PPC

Pay per Click is a way for sites to appear in prominent positions on search engine results pages by paying the engine to display their results. Most engines clearly separate these results from the organic results, typically by placing them on a shaded background, although some engines are starting to blur the line between the two. Paid results tend to occur at the top of a page and in the right hand column. Please see the examples below for further elucidation.

It is surely no exaggeration to say that Pay per Click (PPC) as a means of advertising is still in its infancy. When PPC pioneers such as Goto (later Overture; currently Yahoo!) first opened for business in late 1997, many internet analysts laughed, thinking the idea of bidding for positions on a search index was ridiculous and unworkable. Since then, the industry has taken off exponentially and is now worth an annual £760 million in the UK alone. Online advertising now represents around 8% of all advertising.

Many sites running one or more PPC campaigns find that around 30% of their referrals come from these clicks.

SEO and PPC: Conceptual Differences

The most important thing to remember is that SEO and PPC are complementary strategies. There is no conflict between using the two techniques, and both will be more successful if used together as opposed to using just one or the other in isolation.

The most obvious difference is the price tag that comes with these two techniques. You are paying for the clicks that PPC sends your way, whereas the clicks from SEO are free. Getting to the top of the SEO tree for your most lucrative search terms requires hard work. Getting to the top of the PPC tree for the same search terms requires money (just how much is dependent on the competition for that particular search term) and work. Both PPC and SEO require hard work researching keywords so that you know which search terms to buy (for PPC) and which terms to optimise for (SEO). Different creatives per search term or group (PPC) and different HTML coding for each page of your site (SEO) both need to be written to entice customers. SEO has the added complication that the title tags need to be written with the search engines in mind as well.

PPC can be characterised as a quick boost of traffic to a particular site. If you’re willing to pay the price of the clicks, then you can buy a top position for your chosen search terms in the major Pay per Click engines. Providing your search term has enough traffic, and your creative is tight and enticing, you should notice a bump in traffic.

SEO is a slower process. You are unlikely to see major changes to your traffic in the early stages, as so much of SEO is to do with the structure and environment of your site.

However, the effects of SEO are both longer lasting and cheaper than PPC. With PPC, the moment you stop your campaign the traffic dries up entirely. SEO on the other hand will continue to bring in traffic even if you stop SEO work on the site, although you will need to ensure that your SEO campaign keeps abreast of changes in the search engine algorithms.

Search Engine Optimisation and Pay per Click are both new technologies that have had to evolve to keep pace with the fast changing online world. Both are near-essential techniques for driving traffic to a website and for showing the world your products and services.