Natural Rankings or Paid Placements?

This article describes how firms can use natural search engine rankings, sponsored advertising or a mixture of the two to yield effective results on the search engines.

INTRODUCTION TO SEARCH ENGINES

No-one can deny that search engines are one of the most important resources to drive traffic to your website. Google now processes more than 150 million searches every day (Google, 2001) and therefore it is essential that your business product or service can be found.

It is surprising that there are still many businesses that do not fully understand and appreciate how important and influential online marketing can be.

There are currently a number of methods that you can use to promote your website on search engines, however the main two that are used are natural rankings (by using search engine optimisation) and sponsored advertising.

NATURAL RANKINGS & SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

A natural ranking is a listing on a search engine that has not been directly paid for. These listings can be seen down the left hand side of your Internet browser. Natural rankings can only be achieved through hard work and meticulous thinking which is known as search engine optimisation and marketing.

The objective of search engine optimisation is to increase your businesses online visibility and traffic by ranking highly in search results for the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your website. If you search on your target keywords, you will see the leading website in the rankings. Your businesses aim should be to better that number one website.

Optimisation of your website is the starting block for achieving the results you are looking for. Once this is achieved it is vital to continue to market and promote your website online to ensure that it is noticed and viewed. When choosing the right search engine optimisation company to optimise and market your website, it is very difficult to justify spending money on an intangible service. The only way to select the right company is to see their previous search engine optimisation results. From the results you can begin to understand and appreciate the online visibility your own company could achieve.

The great thing about natural rankings is the fact that the consumer is searching to find your business rather than your business pushing to find the consumer. Natural rankings can only be achieved over a period of time rather than over night and therefore requires dedication and a high level of understanding within the market. For this reason it can potentially give the consumer a great deal of confidence in what your business has to offer. Ask yourself the question – "When I type in a search phrase, which listing am I likely to click on?" Most if not all of us would automatically click on the top 5 or 10 listings. We would seldom scroll through page 3 and onwards because we would have found what we were looking for within the first few listings.

ADVANTAGES

Agreed fixed cost to optimise, market and achieve results

Long term listing with natural placement

Higher click through ratios due to improved trust

Pull demand rather than push demand

Improving your brand potential

Improved overall cost effectiveness and ROI




DISADVANTAGES

Higher initial investment

Increased time taken to achieve effective results (between 6 and 12 months)

No guarantees compared to paid placements

Heavy competition for many popular keywords

Finding the right search engine optimisation company

PAID PLACEMENTS – Pay Per Click (PPC)

Paid placements are listings on search engines that are paid for on a pay per click basis. These listings can be seen predominantly down the right hand side of your Internet browser. Each time someone enters one of your selected keywords or phrases and then clicks through to your website via your paid listing, you have to pay a click fee which is dependent upon the level of competition visible for that specific keyword. You have to bid your highest click fee for each of your chosen keywords and the higher your click fee with respect to others, the higher your advert will be in the sponsored listings section.

For example, if you owned a Web Design Company in Southampton, two possible keywords could be 'website design' and website design southampton'. As you can see in Table 1, the level of competition and effective click fees for these two keywords are very different.

Table 1

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