Pay
Per Click services offer an opportunity to bid
against your competition to get top search engine
listings in various search engines such as Yahoo,
MSN, Alta Vista, Lycos, Netscape & Infospace,
etc. These pay per click services can be very
rewarding and provide great results. However,
they can also become very expensive as bidding
for desired search terms becomes increasingly
expensive where the highest bidder wins. Pay per
click services are usually listed as sponsored
results and they are usually highlighted at the
top of the search engine results/rankings. Literally,
the people with the most money win. They get these
sponsored listings despite the quality of their
web site, services or products. As a result of
this type of service, many people, who work hard
to optimize their web sites, prefer not to utilize
sponsored results of pay per click services which
they refer to as "cheating or hired gun results."
Pay per click services are largely controlled
by a single company which has become very successful,
i.e. they appear to have become a monopoly and
they successfully control the pay per click market.
Hence, for these reasons, many Internet searchers
will skip or ignore the sponsored results provided
by pay per click services. Fortunately, Google,
the most popular and widely used search engine,
as well as a few other top search engines, do
not participate in these pay per click services.
As lucrative as the pay per click opportunity
is for struggling search engines, instead of selling
out to the highest bidders, Google and a few of
the other top search engines prefer to rank web
sites based solely on the merit of their content
which they provide for their products and services.
Though
the affordability of long term use of pay per
click services is often cost prohibitive, they
do provide short term solutions which can be very
effective at driving traffic to a web site. We
usually recommend this type of service for those
web sites that want to realize immediate results,
particularly in very competitive markets, while
we optimize their web site for similar long term
results at a fraction of the cost. Though pay
per click services provide immediate results,
these results are only as productive as the accuracy
of targeting key search terms. Similar to search
engine optimizing, which should be the long term
goal of all web site companies, the quality of
your results will be reflected by the accuracy
of your research for the key search terms which
you bid on for pay per click services. Another
advantage of pay per click services is the invaluable
tracking opportunities which they provide. They
can literally provide you with the source of your
leads and inquiries. This market information can
then be utilized to optimize your site and conduct
targeted email campaigns, etc. Another advantage
to pay per click services is that you do not pay
for the service until someone clicks on the sponsored
listing and actually visits your web site. Unfortunately,
many people will click but never purchase. With
pay per click services you pay for each time they
click on that sponsored listing. Managing pay
per click services can be very time consuming.
In
summary, the advantages of pay per click are immediate
results in terms of driving traffic to a web site.
They provide immediate market exposure to a certain
percentage of the market. Researching key search
terms, similar to search engine optimization,
is critical in order to produce desired results
by utilizing pay per click services. Though determining
key word search terms can be time consuming, the
results can be utilized for both search engine
optimization as well as pay per click services.
Eventually, continual use of pay per click services
will become cost prohibitive as more and more
people bid for popular search terms. Hence, generally
speaking, pay per click services offer a great
short term solution to a long term problem. Though
pay per click services are increasingly expensive
and potentially time consuming to manage, they
can be utilized with exceptional results while
your web site is undergoing search engine optimization
for similar long term results at a fraction of
the cost. Monetary limits should be established
for pay per click services in order to avoid exceeding
your marketing budget.
For
more information about pay per click services
and search engine optimization, please contact
us. TerenceNet, Inc., a publicly traded company,
offers a full range of Internet marketing services
for our clients including ebusiness consultation,
web marketing strategies, search engine optimization,
web site design & development, logo design,
graphic design, ecommerce solutions, shopping
cart, web site hosting & technical support,
domain name registration, perl and cgi scripts,
networking, pay per click advertising services
and targeted email marketing. |
