Search engine optimization (SEO) is the industry standard for driving web traffic and converting customers. Every company or organization with a website should be taking advantage of it. Just know that it can take months for an SEO strategy to start producing. If you need to boost traffic quickly, you might consider PPC marketing.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an established form of marketing that has been around since the internet’s earliest days. It looked quite a bit different way back when, but the basic principle was the same as it is today: an organization places online ads but only pays for those ads when customers click on them.
Organizations can pay for professional PPC services or handle things themselves. My advice is to hire a service provider unless you fully understand PPC advertising and everything that comes with it. PPC can quickly become a money pit if you don’t know what you’re doing.
The Basic Premise
Webtek Digital Marketing is a Salt Lake City, UT and Austin, TX company that offers PPC services along with SEO, digital marketing, content creation, and more. They explain the basic premise of PPC as follows:
PPC advertising is a means of advertising on digital platforms in a way that is cost effective and easy to budget for. Because advertisers pay for ads based on clicks or impressions, they do not pay for ads that don’t work.
That makes perfect sense. Not having to pay for ads that don’t work is crucial when you consider how much money a company could spend on marketing. But there is more to PPC than just paying for clicks or impressions. There is also the idea of targeting.
Market to Specific Groups
A big advantage PPC has over other forms of advertising is its ability to target specific groups in minute detail. For the purposes of illustration, let us compare PPC against direct mail marketing. If you were to launch a direct mail campaign, the best you could do in terms of targeting is to choose the zip codes you would send mailers to. You couldn’t designate delivery house-by-house based on who lives in each one.
With PPC, you can drill down much further. You can target potential customers by geographic region, age, sex, income, interests, employment, online habits, and on and on. By the way, this partially explains why Google collects so much personal information. Doing so allows them to target PPC ads very specifically.
Near Instant Results
Although it has taken us a while to get to this point, the next thing to talk about is the speed at which results can be seen. Simply put, you get near instant results with PPC. The minute you place your bid and publish an ad, it gets tossed into the cue. Within a few hours you will see whether your ad is getting enough exposure. And if it is, you will see if people are clicking on it.
PPC advertising can generate a quick boost in traffic within hours – or even minutes in some cases. Just know that more traffic is not the be-all and end-all of SEO and marketing. All the traffic in the world is of little value if visitors are not converting.
It may be appropriate to take advantage of PPC’s speed just to get the ball rolling. Get people to your website once and then rely on quality content to bring them back. As far as boosting traffic is concerned, PPC can do it faster than SEO. That doesn’t mean PPC advertising is the best way to go. But it is something to think about.