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March 11, 2020
You often hear about ad blindness and how a lot of people don’t click on paid results. But the fact is, nearly 50 percent of searchers click on PPC ads.
Those clicks cost money though. Isn’t it better to get your traffic for free from organic listings? Natural search might be cheaper but if you approach paid search correctly, it won’t cost you anything. After all, if you could earn $2 for every $1 you spend on ads, why wouldn’t you do that?
Let’s look at some advertising benefits of paid search, particularly if your organic rankings are on the low side.
One of the biggest advantages of paid traffic is that it gives you higher visibility, especially when your organic search rankings are low. Paid results appear at or near the top of the search results page so you can run ads that outrank all the organic results.
You can launch a PPC ad and have it start generating traffic in a matter of minutes as well. The short turnaround time gives you the ability to try different things and rank for timely keywords. If you see something in the news that’s related to your market, you can get an ad in front of your audience while the topic is still hot.
Visibility isn’t only about getting a top ranking when your organic results are low though. As your SEO work kicks in and your rankings start to improve, the PPC ads let you double up your rankings.
The more places your audience sees you, the more likely they are to click through to your site. Having several results on the same page increases your odds of getting the click.
The short turnaround time for running PPC ads means you can test different options to see what works and what doesn’t. Launch an ad, give it a bit of time to generate some data, then pause it and run a variation.
Change the ad copy, use a different image, display a different domain in the ad, or change some other factor. Let that one run for a bit and compare the numbers to the first ad.
One of the two is bound to do better. Whether it’s a higher clickthrough rate (CTR), a better conversion rate, or a lower cost-per-click (CPC), one of the two ads will outperform the other. Once you know which it is, drop the lower-performing one and test a new variation.
Depending on your ad budget and the amount of traffic in your market, these tests can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. To do the same kind of tests with your SEO campaigns, you’ll need weeks or months.
SEO takes much longer to kick in so you won’t have a meaningful amount of data for quite a while. When you make a change, the whole process starts again and it will be another few weeks or months before you know which works best.
Use PPC to optimize your ads then move the winners into your SEO campaign. The results are already proven so you can expect those keywords to convert well once your SEO efforts have time to push your rankings up.
Google isn’t the only place you can get paid traffic. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter also sell PPC ads on their platforms. Running ads there gives you more visibility than relying on your audience seeing your posts in their timeline.
This is especially true on Facebook, where the newsfeed algorithm limits what people see in their feeds. Even if you have a large following, a small number of them will see any posts you make. By running ads targeted at your ideal audience instead, far more of them will see it.
A cynical person might think this is by design. Not showing all your posts to your followers pushes you towards the paid ads, which means Facebook makes more money. Whether that’s the reason for it or not, you can use it to your advantage.
Another thing you can do with organic advertising that you can’t do with SEO is ad scheduling which is also called dayparting. This lets you schedule your ads to only run at the busiest times of the day.
If you know your audience is more likely to be searching for your keywords in the evening or on weekends, using ad scheduling to only show your ads then. This lets you test even more options to see if different strategies work better at different times or days of the week.
Once again, you can use this to your advantage whether your organic rankings are low or high. But if you find that different ads work better at different times, that doesn’t translate over to the organic side of things very well.
If you want to have different things show up in the results depending on when people are searching for it, you have a lot more work ahead of you organically. You need to get all the different options ranked all the time – you can’t schedule when things show up in the search results.
Many people wonder if running PPC ads helps their pages rank higher in the organic results. The simple answer is no, it will not affect your organic ranking. You can be the highest spending advertiser on Google for your market but it won’t help your natural ranking.
It can help indirectly though. As your pages start to rank higher, the extra visibility you get by having a paid ad and organic result on the same page can boost the CTR on your organic listing.
CTR is one of Google’s ranking factors so if your page is getting a higher number of clicks, it can help boost it to a higher ranking.
These PPC advertising benefits are powerful but they take some time to launch and track, not to mention the time it takes to learn how it all works. If you’re busy and don’t have that kind of time, Punch Drunk Digital can help.
With our PPC service, we’ll look after your ad campaigns and you can focus on looking after all the new customers we’ll help you find. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you grow your business.
