Online Branding Blog – reactorr.com

SEO, Social Media, PPC Compared

SEO, Social Media, and PPC were recently compared for effectiveness at generating leads and sales in digital marketing between B2B and B2C in the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report amongst 500 U.S. online marketers, with about two-thirds of all respondents identified themselves as B2B marketers.

The results? While the clear winner is SEO, about 60 percent of respondents said they will increase their budget for social media marketing; with 53 percent planning to increase their budget towards SEO and 40 about percent will be increasing their PPC budget.

While social media is clearly the trend as of late, it’s often difficult to measure. But despite this, social media is not hype. What needs to be understood is that it takes time, and it can have significant influence towards online branding efforts.

SEO might take a while before seeing signs of progress, but it’s the clear winner. With the highest conversion rates, SEO outperforms all other means of online marketing. It’s worth mentioning that while PPC can bring traffic almost instantly, it will cost more over time than SEO, and is most suitable for starting a campaign to acquire traffic until an SEO campaign kicks into high gear. Additionally, PPC only earns about 10% of the potential search traffic, and if you’re not in the top spots (which are more expensive bids) then you won’t see a lot of visits.

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Tags: online branding, PPC, SEM, SEO, Social Media

Search Marketing for Small Business

There’s no doubt that it takes a little while for an SEO campaign to get off the ground. Which is why Search Marketing is a great way to get lead generation working for your business. Using Google Adwords, a business can be online and accepting leads in a matter of minutes.

Search marketing is what’s also known as Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing, where you pay only for the ads clicks on, not how often its displayed. This Cost Per Action type of marketing is popular as it allows you to better control your marketing budget.  If you’re new to this type of advertising, you’ll be glad to know that you can cap your daily spend.

It should be noted that while Search Marketing with programs like Google Adwords or similar options can bring in leads fast, the Cost Per Click quickly adds up depending on what business you’re in. Also, the paid search listing typically get 20 percent of the clicks from search results, while the natural search listings tend to get the other 80 percent of the clicks. The thing with the natural listings is SEO can be it take 6 months or more to start ranking due to the cycles of link crawling and indexing. But on the other hand, SEO tends to be a better return long term strategy, despite the initial up front investment.

An interesting introduction to Adwords can be found at NY Times.

How Long Does SEO Take?

This is asked often, so I’m placing the answer here and will refer others to this post in the future.

SEO goes in cycles. Links are built, then they are crawled by SE’s and indexed. But when the Search Engine crawls and indexes content it doesn’t necessarily reoganize its index and find your new rank. With Google, the search engine will update its entire index about every four months. And since Google has well over half the market share we’ll just focus on that one Search Engine for this post.

Let’s suppose that we started a campaign in January, and Google just updated its index. You would be starting at square one. The exceptions being things like the age of the domain, age of existing links, strength and relevance of those existing links, and whether the links were anchor text or simply URL’s.

If your hypothetical website called widgetworldusa dot com only had links pointing at it with the URL, it’s link profile needs work. But if you widget site had anchor text linking to it for phrases you’re pursuing, like “industrial strength widgets”, then you’re off to a good start.

Now about 3 months later you’ve built more  “industrial strength widgets” links, but not all of them were crawled and included in the index yet. So on the first update you can hope for 25-50% of your links to have been picked up. These will go into consideration on the next update that’s another 3 months away.

Now it’s 6 months later and you’re still hard at work on link building. This is the second Google update, with probably half or more of those links in the first update now included. But between update one and two you can again hope for 25-50% of your links to have been picked up.

Factors that generally play into how long does seo take can include the age of your domain, the relevance, the age of the link, the age of the link the domain is on, the age of the domain that the link is on, the authority of the domain your link is on, and much more.

Hopefully this provides a little insight about why SEO takes so long, and why many people offering SEO services usually require a commitment of 6 to 12 months to start a project.

For those wanting instantaneous results, Search Marketing and PPC is probably more suitable. But you should note that it accounts for less than 20% of the clickthroughs for search engine results pages (SERPs) and that the natural listings and SEO boast 80% of the clicks.

The best strategy is a mix of both, with Search Marketing to get you started until your SEO campaign catches up. It’s also worth noting that your cost per customer and SEO ROI will decrease as time goes on. Because SEO provides a long term strategy for increased consumer presence, it has added value as compared to paid search marketing.

Search Marketing for Brands

Search marketing is a great way for brands to gain quick exposure, and if you including contextual advertising you can have a campaign running in 5 or 10 minutes. It’s easy to see its appeal but what advertisers don’t realize is they’re overlooking huge opportunities.

 

While paid search marketing can be one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing, it captures a small portion of the potential customers. When you compare paid listings versus natural listings, the Pay per Click (PPC) ads tend to get a little under 20% of the search traffic. That leaves a whopping 80% left to natural search results.

 

In a report called ‘Search Attitude’ by UK search agency Tamar, it’s noted that only 5% of Internet users are likely to follow a paid search result over natural listings.

 

One of the downsides of search engine optimization (SEO) is the time and investment required to get a campaign working. But when you consider the potential SEO ROI it soon becomes obvious.

When you perform keyword research and see the potential that SEO can provide as a sales channel, its obviously worthwhile.