Why the first page of Google is important

Google’s search results are getting more robust— with Knowledge Panels, answer boxes, expandable related questions, local results, and more. With so many ways to stand out, working for top ranking is well worth the effort.

Getting on the first page means significantly higher click-through rate

It’s a known fact that the first page of Google captures the majority of traffic, but there is also significant differences in click-through rates for the top vs bottom results.

• First result: 36.4% clickthrough rate
• Second result: 12.5% clickthrough rate
• Third result: 9.5% clickthrough rate

With the last result from 10 on the first page getting only 2.2%.

So if you’re not at the top of Google search results, you are missing out on a lot of clicks.

Get immediate exposure

Top results for Google searches now also populate “Position Zero” answer boxes, otherwise known as featured snippets:

Earning a top spot on Google could lead to getting featured in a featured snippet, granting your business immediate exposure and increasing your credibility.

How does first page ranking benefit your business?

It’s important to understand the different goals that getting a top ranking on Google can help your business to achieve.

1. Improve your visibility

With 167 billion searches per month, getting on the first page of Google is like planting your business on the busy road in town. The more people that see your website, the greater your brand awareness. The more familiar consumers are with your brand, the more receptive they will be to conversion activities.

2. Generate more leads

Your goal is to get on the first page for queries that your ideal customers are performing. By doing so, you get discovered by consumers that are searching online with the intent to buy or engage. These people are the most likely to convert into leads and customers for your business.

3. Increase engagement

According to Adweek, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying, and Google is the go-to for this. With answer boxes, the “People also ask” section, and local results showing contact information, maps, reviews, ratings, and descriptions, Google’s search engine results page alone enables consumers to learn about, compare, and engage with your business before even clicking on your result.

4. Drive website traffic

Not only does being on the first page of Google drastically increase traffic to your website; not being on the first page of Google has a huge disadvantage. In fact, the first page of Google captures at least 71% of web traffic (some sources say up to 92%), and the second page is far from a close second: It drops to 6% of website clicks. This steep decline in web traffic is an indicator of just how important the first page of Google is.

4. Increase your industry authority

Getting on the first page of Google requires regularly creating high-quality content that Google recognizes is satisfying the needs of its searchers. This takes time, but the increased traffic and trust that will result is well worth the investment.

In addition, writing regularly about your industry and business will require you to stay in tune with what your target audience wants to know as well as what the latest updates are in your industry. Appearing on the first page of Google is important because it facilitates the development and maintenance of a robust knowledge base upon which your business can firmly stand.

5. Earn trust

Google’s algorithm is designed to recognize spammy, suspicious, and low-quality content. If you’re consistently showing up on the first page of Google, it means that Google recognizes you as a trusted source of information, and consumers trust businesses that Google trusts.

6. Build your audience

As mentioned above, getting on the first page of Google requires creating high-quality, evergreen content. This type of content is the gift that keeps on giving; it can be repurposed and redistributed across a variety of marketing channels including social media, email, and paid ads.

Your content-driven efforts to get on the first page of Google will provide you with more material and more opportunities to engage with your target audience, nurture leads, and stay top of mind.

How many different ways can you get on the first page of Google for free?

Getting on the first page of Google is not only a common goal among small business owners, but also a very feasible one. Google is not focused on quantity, but quality. As a result, a larger company or bigger budget does not equate to top rank. There are several factors behind Google’s algorithm and, thanks to the fact that Google’s results page has many different components, there are also different types of media that can achieve first-page status. They include:

• Blog posts and website pages (in organic results)

• Your Google My Business account (in the local/maps section)

• Snippets of your website content (in Google’s many search results page features including “People also ask” and the answer box.

• Your landing pages (This is via the paid ads section, which is not free, but still worth mentioning. For more help with using paid strategies to get on the first page of Google, head to this post on Google Ads tutorials.)

How to use your website to get on the first page of Google

The practice of aligning your website with search engine ranking factors is called search engine optimization (SEO). You do not necessarily search engine-optimize your whole site at once, but rather each individual page on your site. Here’s how to do so:

1. Determine your keywords

First, determine which search queries you want Google to answer with your website pages. These are known as keywords—which, by the way, can be single words OR phrases.

Each page on your website should target a different set of keywords so that the pages aren’t competing with each other.

The right keywords for your business are those that your ideal customers are typing in to get the products and services they need.

2. Tell Google what keywords you’re using

Google works by crawling the web, ranking the millions of pages that exist, and storing them in an index. When a user performs a search, Google can then scan through its more organized index  to quickly come up with relevant results.

Therefore, another important step for showing up on the first page of Google is to make it as easy as possible for Google to scan, index, and retrieve your site. Do this by placing keywords in the following places:

Meta title

Every blog post and page of your website has a meta title. This title appears at the top of your page in the form of a header but also as the title of that page’s listing in search results (depending upon your CMS settings).

Meta description

The meta description is the little blurb that shows up underneath the title in Google’s search results.

In addition to telling Google what your page is about, the meta description quickly tells a searcher what they can expect if they click on your page, increasing the relevant clicks to that page. Therefore the meta description helps Google to put your business on the right first page for the right searches and helps Google searchers to keep it there.

URL

Your URL consists of your domain name (such as wordstream.com), followed by a forward slash, followed by text separated by dashes.

Including keywords in your URL will help Google more quickly identify what your page is about. Also, the URL appears in between the title and meta description in search results. A clean URL that matches the title of the page is more appealing and trustworthy to users, and better suited for first-page appearances.

Alt tags

Google can only see images if the image has a text alternative (aka alt tag). If your alt tag includes keywords, Google can detect further relevancy of that page and feel more comfortable putting you on its first page of search results.

3. Write for humans

The key to getting on the first page of Google is providing useful, trustworthy, easy-to-read, but informative content that will keep your target audience on your pages and coming back for more. And conversationally sharing the knowledge already in your head is both free and easy. Just remember that if you want to rank on the first page of Google for a particular keyword search, your page needs to provide the information, and not just the keywords, that users are trying to obtain when they type that search into Google.

4. Emphasize location

Another free way to get your website pages on the first page of Google is to target location-based queries. Make sure your website clearly indicates your city and/or geographic area, via your contact page and potentially also through blog posts and services pages. That way, when people search: “your industry” + ”your city”, Google will pick up that information and show your business as a “near me” search result.

Even if a user does not search using a specific location, Google will still serve up geographically relevant results based on their IP address, so local SEO is not only free, but always important.

5. Optimize for mobile

You will not find a website at the top of a Google search that is not responsive. Consumers now use phones and tablets more than computers and laptops, and the majority of local searches are performed on mobile devices. As a result, Google favors mobile-friendly websites.

Responsive is ideal, as your website will adapt to any size screen and maintain functionality. However, if you don’t have a responsive website, there are adjustments you can make to your site to ensure the most seamless experience for a mobile user.

6. Focus on user experience

Being mobile-friendly isn’t enough for a website. It must also be appealing and user-friendly. A website with intuitive navigation, clear calls to action, and answers to your visitors’ most immediate questions will keep visitors there longer and coming back later—which Google will notice and, in turn, rank you higher. The higher you rank, the more traffic you will get to your site, and the more likely you are to show up on the first page.

 

Google has been busy adding speed metrics, over the last few years, which they have stated will influence the search engine ranking of websites. There are few important factors that contribute to the SEO of websites in last few years that Google changed things:

  • Speed of website
  • SSL certificate, or does your website has https or not
  • Mobile optimized websites

To continue on the path of adding new metircs that work with SEO and to improve the experience web users have with websites, Google has introduced three new metrics for determines the page experience one can have on a website – they go under the name Core Web Vitals.

What are the Core Web Vitals

Google Core Web Vitals

The Core Web Vitals are three extra factors that can influence the page experience a web user has on a website.

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – this measures loading performance. How long does it take for the largest contentful paint to be loaded. Google states under 2.5 seconds are good, whilst 4+ seconds as poor.
  • First Input Delay (FID) – this measures interactivity. How quickly is the web page able to become interact upon being requested to load. Under 100 milliseconds is deemed good, whilst over 300 milliseconds is poor.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – this measures the web page stability. How the content moves with different parts of loading, or how responsive and stable the site is. If it is under 100 milliseconds, this is good, whilst over 250 milliseconds is poor.

The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile devices.

What should you do?

Google’s Core Web Vitals are looking to be properly introduced in early 2021. since they are in the early development stage at this moment and website owners have time to correct and make changes to their website to improve their Core Web Vitals.

On the whole, improving the LCP is all about improving the loading time of the website, which is something website owners should have been doing for a while now anyway since the website speed is one of the important factors for some time..

For FID, this can relate to your server and a few other metrics, which you can work to improve on if it is poor.

The interesting new metric is the CLS, since pop-up banners, adverts loading and other extra elements can cause a website to have a really poor CLS. For this reason, this could prove problematic for website owners as to how to improve. You can view your website’s core web vitals by either using the Pagespeed insights or by looking in your Google Search Console.

Google has made clear that content is always the biggest factor in ranking, as so it should be. However, if there are many websites with similarly good content, factors such as CLS could be the difference between ranking top to bottom on search engine results pages.

A way to analyse all the data we obtain, we use machine learning and automation more often now in digital marketing. Data science does this by turning theories into evidence. Big data is one data science term you might come across. It is large and complex data sets used to identify trends and patterns that can help businesses make better and more personalised decisions for their customers. In PPC, that kind of technology can work wonders for optimising budget spend, improving CTR, and overall performance.

Before technology was as good as it is now, some decisions were made by best guesses and past trends. That didn’t always work good and people and businesses lost a lot of money. Today, data science can help find trends to save people millions and give businesses the chance to improve customer relationships and services.

How can data science help PPC?

Whether you use Google Ads or other PPC alternatives, automation is at the forefront. Other benefits of data science in PPC include:

  • Identifying outliers in impressions and clicks over time to confirm whether significant changes are due to seasonality or something else.
  • Creating better split tests.
  • Creating and optimising remarketing lists.
  • Tailoring PPC campaigns aligned to particular audiences and when they’re online.
  • Identifying unusual traffic.
  • Understanding buyer’s preferences.
  • Deeper analysis of ad copy.

Find data sources and cluster them. The quality of your data sources can affect your insights so use the best tools you can. Software like SEMrush, Google Data Studio, and Tableau can help collate and analyse data quicker and easier.

PPC needs to work together with all marketing channels. PPC professionals strength lies in combining their efforts with everyone within a marketing team. That means collaborating with sales and using CRM data, developers who help create landing pages and websites, SEO, and customer support. Data insights can provide goals and best practices for everyone to follow to ensure a smooth customer journey from impression to goal conversion.

Visualize PPC performance.  With data visualisation you can turn all that into insightful information. Performance reports are important to showing where PPC is succeeding or needs improvement and the ability to visualise that data is important too. Data visualisation can find trends, normalise larger datasets, compare data over time or help further testing. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple bar chart or line graph to show you where things are going right or wrong.

Data in isolation has no meaning and being able to test it in controlled conditions can lead to important insights. That’s the beauty of data science – it provides knowledge you can use to make better judgements. In PPC, those judgements can impact metrics like ROAS (return on ad spend), Quality Score, impression share, and cost per conversion.

Make good content. Sounds pretty simple, but in reality if you have a good content you will get more views on YouTube since there will always be people who want to see it. There are a lot of scammy ways to get more views, but if you provide the value with your videos that YouTube algorithm will put your video in front of people who are interested in a subject of your video. And if the value of your video is good, you will get likes and that will tell YouTube that your videos are good and promote them again.

When you are thinking about topics for your videos to create, try to think of videos that are connected to a similar topic so you can create a series and not just individual videos about a single topic. Spread the topic to several videos, that way you will have people returning to finish the series or at the end of one video jump straight to the next one. And also organizing your videos in a playlist of a similar topic makes things even better, as one of your videos stops, the other starts playing right away. Good way to keep your audience watching for a longer period of time.

If you are making content for YouTube, then like with Google you need to be familiar with YouTube SEO. Since both Google and YouTube are search engines, then you need to understand how they work so people can find your content more easily. And the major thing is as always – keywords. You need to research your keywords, see how other videos on similar topics used the keywords, try to use the same strategies. Because, if other videos on similar topics are ranking high, then they must have been doing something correct. Use that as a point of reference.

Two most important parts of YouTube SEO are making a good title with a proper keyword placed at the start of the title and a video description where you want to include your target keywords at least once. Description is not as important as title in search terms, but has a weight of its own and you should not stuff too many keywords you are targeting into description, it should feel natural.

Third attribute in the SEO segment is the least important but can make a difference and that is tags. Unless they are using some kind of browser extension, nobody can see your video tags, but that doesn’t mean you should not put them. They bring more relevance for YouTube algorithms to sort out where your video belongs.

Not a bad strategy for more YouTube views is also connecting with other YouTubers that do similar content. You don’t need to be just a competition, you can work together and it might benefit you both. Now that only works if you are on the same level of YouTube exposure. But if some well established YouTube channel can help you out, by no means say no.

Another strategy to get more views is to funnel your viewers to other of your videos with cards and end screens. You can suggest during one of your videos to users to check out some other of yours videos or at the end of the video suggest other mostly similar videos that might be interesting to your audience and that way keep them engaged with your content.

Good way to make some extra views is to create a blog connected to your videos. Since for the majority of time you will have to write a script or an outline for your video, it’s easy to expand that to a blog post to cover those who search on Google or other search engines and you can put your video into a blog post for those who like to listen more than read.

One thing many people often skip over in promotion of their videos on YouTube is making a good Thumbnail. Best way is to check other videos about the subject you are talking about and how their thumbnails look like. Check the ones with most views and engagement and make a similar thumbnail, if it worked for them then there is no reason to overcomplicate things. If you don’t find a video that stands out than you have room to make a better thumbnail and draw more views to your video and beat the competition.

And last advice but not the worst one, but rather the obvious one. Spread your video on social media, whatever you are using. Period.

Instagram is a must for a business. With 1 billion people using the platform each month and at least 200 millions people visiting at least one profile daily, there is really no reason why to skip Instagram in your business plans. So here are some strategies for your Instagram growth.

Post consistently

Without consistent posting you might not engage the audience enough to gain constant following. And if you do post often, then stop for some reason you will confuse your followers and might start losing them and eventually they might forget about you overall even if you get back on regular posting after a dry period.

Use scheduling tools

This is connected with the first strategy. If you have trouble posting regularly, maybe it is time to use some tool that will post instead of you. You can set a schedule for the whole month and relax, not worrying about keeping your Instagram posting consistent.

Give Instagram Live a chance

Some stats say that 82% of people would rather watch a live video than to see a post. So why not give it a try. Long time ago it was said in the SEO world that content is the king. Well in Social world Video is the queen it seems since Instagram really loves it and even it’s algorithm will favor businesses that use this feature by boosting their organic engagement and making their profiles easier to discover.

Partner with other brands

Two heads are better than one. One of the better strategies on instagram is to connect with a similar brand and try to push marketing plans together. When you connect with a similar brand, you are exposed to their followers who might be interested in your products, and vice versa. Connecting two similar brands with products in similar niche and making a marketing campaign together might help both brands to catch a larger audience.

Run contests

If you want to get bigger exposure to your brand, a good idea is giving incentives to your followers by running a contest and in the end giving away rewards. People love gifts and free stuff and just for that only they are willing to give an extra friend tag, reshare a post or give some post a like. Without that extra incentive which in longer run doesn’t really cost a brand a lot, has a possibility to grab a bigger reach of new people who might become new followers or get more activity from people who are already following the brand.

Instagram stories

Same thing as Instagram Live, the Stories should be your friend because more than half a billion people use Instagram Stories every day and one third of those are related to businesses. Stories started growing in popularity and using them with your brand gives another way to engage with your audience. And the best part about stories is that they are really easy to do – a quick video or an image that will be live for 24 hours.

Make your Instagram page cohesive

Keep your page posting looking like they really belong to the same brand. If you shift your style with every post you make about your brand, you will lose the cohesiveness with your posts around your brand. Your followers will expect a certain style throughout your brand and you might confuse them. That is of course if you are not launching a new product that requires a new style, but even then you need to stick with that new style you have chosen for your new product.

Use the hashtags

Instagram posts that use hashtags get 12-13% more engagement when compared to those without any hashtags. They help your post to fit into a certain category and they are more easily discovered. Only problem with hashtags is they quickly lose the exposure they give you due to high volume of posts coming all the time, so they are good for 24-48 hours before something else in the same category is pushed forward in trends. So this is connected with the strategy of posting often.

Pay to play

While Instagram for growing business organically is a viable option, of course there is a pay to win option too. Since Instagram is a Facebook  company their ads work pretty much the same. You can for a certain budget target a specific audience and without too much problems get exposure you want for your brand. Sure organical traffic is great, but if you want faster results targeted ads can do miracles.

Last year at the Google Marketing Live event, Google introduced two image driven ad tests. Gallery ads for Search campaigns weren’t giving good results so it will be removed this summer, but Discovery ads finished their testing and are now available to all advertisers globally.

Discovery ads are eligible to serve across the YouTube Home and Watch Next feeds, Discover feed on the Google Search app and in Gmail Promotion and Social tabs and open up new avenues for both Google and advertisers.

If you’ve failed to notice ads in Discover feed yet, that’s because Google is treading very lightly here. Google machine learning is used to determine when to serve a Discovery ad that will deliver the best results on the campaign objective, and the results continue to improve.

When Google introduced the Discovery campaign, it said that the Discover feed has more than 800,000 monthly users. Now, Google is spreading its usage across the YouTube, Discover and Gmail surfaces to claim a combined audience of 2.9 billion people. In comparison to Facebook shared platforms, they reported 2.99 billion monthly active people.

Discovery campaigns aren’t just another effort by Google to move beyond search intent and deliver audience connections throughout the funnel, they give Google an entrance into working with social budgets and teams. Which team is ultimately responsible for Discovery campaigns will vary, but in many cases agencies and companies will have search, display and now social teams with a hand in Google Ads campaigns.

How to set up your Discovery ads? There are two ad formats in Discovery campaigns – Discovery carousel with multiple images and Discovery ads with single image. For the images, Google can scan your website and find the ones with proper dimensions, or you can upload your own. Google’s creative guide gives advice – aspirational imagery and copy is crucial.

Discovery ads in combination with responsive search ads serve up to five headlines and descriptions automatically. Google will also automatically choose call to action in your ads from ten options unless you choose for yourself. Based on geographic targeting, Google will show weekly impressions.

Keep in mind that this is one of Google’s automated universal campaign types, so smart bidding is required and Frequency and Ad Rotation are not available for this campaign type and also choose an average daily budget at least 10 times the value of your target cost-per-action (CPA) bid and wait for at least 40 conversions before making changes to your campaign.

A lot of people will say that during the COVID-19 pandemic the usage of the internet went up to the skies since everyone was stuck in their home and consuming online content. With that many assumed that search traffic exploded also, which is not really the case because the use of the internet does not refer exclusively to online searching but also a wide array of activities like video streaming, virtual meetings, gaming or social media.

But that also doesn’t mean that online searches didn’t go up in this period, especially in categories of health, news and other relevant industries. That as a result had the drop of searches to other things like nonessential business websites and small businesses from both paid and organic search results.

This means that SEO looks very different depending on the industry, since if you have a for this period very relevant and essential business, then SEO was very important for you to push you up over the other competitors in the selective fields. On the other hand if you were running a nonessential business you would feel a huge drop in the visits and thus the SEO then didn’t matter anyway. And all that situation made a lot of small businesses close their doors.

On the positive note, even though the COVID-19 is still trending, it will not do so forever in the search terms. Evergreen questions your customers have will remain relevant long after the pandemic is over.

There is one thing about SEO that people usually don’t think of. SEO is not just about getting traffic to your site, it is about getting qualified traffic. That means that visitors who are getting to your website are looking for what you have to offer in the forest of trending topics and all your hard done SEO over a long period of time made your content stand out with authority on a certain topic. Search engines don’t offer your content for visitors just because you have it, they give it because they think you have something good to offer.

During this pandemic period and economic crisis on the rise, SEO is super important for small businesses. This is mostly because the people want to support small businesses during economic crises as they usually get punched hardest. All the big corporations can usually survive by scaling down and the small business version of scaling down is usually closing down. Thus it creates a sense in the community that if everyone is in financial problems, people will rather give their money for a product or service they need to a local small business and help them out, than giving money to a big corporation who usually fires people to scale down.

And this is where the SEO for small business pays off more than usual because it gives them a competitive edge.

The “new normal” that was brought to us during the April COVID-19 peak forced everyone to quickly go to battle mode against the unexpected challenges and adjust our lives accordingly. As May is coming to end, the situation is getting better and businesses are starting to get back to their feet.

Advertisement business also felt the pandemic impact and marketers across all industries were also pushed to their limits to invent new ways to push their ads in this unusual time when a whole new way of how we search and when we search the internet became standard. Many are still adjusting to these rapid changes in our industry, but the data does look promising. As of early May, PPC campaigns appear to be recovering from the shock of COVID-19.

While many advertisers still are not receiving the same results that they had in March, most are beginning to show some improvement. Specifically, starting the late of April, paid search conversions rebounded to about 89% of their pre-COVID levels. Advertisers on Bing saw less of a drop initially but saw similar recovery in late April.

Our internet usage has skyrocketed, as we work, learn, and stay connected at home more. According to the researches, people are consuming 70% more content online. Advertisers are finding a quickly growing audience with Google Display ads and YouTube, even if most of that time is spent off the SERP.

COVID-19 has limited traditional retail and made ecommerce essential for most people. But small businesses online advertising have done particularly good during April, as their largest competitors like Walmart and Amazon have struggled to manage the high number of orders and have pulled most of their ads from Google. Facebook shared its Q1 2020 performance and reported healthy growth made by increased ad sales despite the pandemic. Facebook noted that as a result of COVID-19, the costs of Facebook ads took a decline in the last three weeks of March and have remained low since.

At the same time, people started to use social media a lot more to stay in contact with their families and friends. People began to use WhatsApp, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, helping Facebook grow its active user base to a new record of 2.6 billion monthly active users.

While it may be a long road back to normal, there’s been new hope for advertisers that are finding more customers online than they were in the early days of this crisis.

Many marketing accounts have seen a steady decline in conversions because it is not the best time for individuals or companies to purchase a specific product or service, but you still need to continue the marketing for the future, collect data to use later. Since people might not be interested now, but remembering your brand and what you have to offer might stil be in the mind after the crisis is over.

With YouTube traffic increasing during the pandemic time, video campaigns in Google Ads can be a cost-effective way to maintain branding if your budget has been reduced.

1. Try out those too-long videos for YouTube ads

You do not need to have a 30-second video to run successful video campaigns on YouTube like you would do on Facebook or Instagram. People go to YouTube to watch videos, and you can use longer video content.  This is where TrueView discovery ads can really help. YouTube is still a search engine and after Google, the second-largest search engine to be exact. People use YouTube to try and find answers and solutions to any questions or problems they may be having. Advertisers who want their content to be at the top of the YouTube search results can run TrueView discovery ads to try and get their video as the top spot.

Discovery ads can help push and build your brand. The image above is showing what your ad may look like on YouTube search results, and that is where TrueView discovery ads can really be good. Research what problems or questions your audience is asking. Target those terms with TrueView discovery campaigns if you have the video ready to offer up a good solution that can help your target audience.

2. Build new custom intent audiences

If you still want to spread your reach beyond the YouTube search results, you can still use audiences to target your TrueView in-stream and discovery ads. And for YouTube advertising, it does not get any better than custom intent audiences. For YouTube ads, you can create audiences based off of search terms people have typed into Google. The keywords will be broad match related, but it will show a level of intent.

3. Lighten up your CTA extensions

YouTube’s call-to-action extensions are only available for video ads running TrueView in-stream campaigns. Advertisers have the option to add a a call-to-action button as well as headline to their in-stream ad. The call-to-action extensions will still be visible alongside the video ad, even if the user decides to skip the video ad.

We can assume most people go to YouTube to be entertained. It is probably not the best thing to push your “Buy Now” CTAs unless you are selling an essential item that is in demand. But if you are using YouTube ads to build brand awareness easier commitments, like “Learn More”, “Read More” or “Visit Site”. This can help build more engagement and potentially drive more traffic if the user feels they do not have to commit to anything.

4. Make sure your video content is quality

If you are softening your approach with your targeting, you better have the video content to back up that approach. Video production doesn’t have to be expensive. Many have cameras on our phones that can compete on a quality level with most of the videos you see on YouTube. In combination with some inexpensive video editing tools and you can create many great quality videos very easy. Reach your audience on YouTube now and convert them later.

Both strategies, SEO and PPC cost money to get traffic to your site. The difference is that for SEO you pay people to get your website free organic traffic. But problem is that happens over time. It may take a year for results to show. For PPC, you pay the service provider, you pay for ads and you get immediate results. This might give a certain feeling that PPC is the way to go. But SEO experts think otherwise and that the best way forward is to use the two together.

Good things about PPC

  • You can pick your keywords and build the ad around it
  • PPC generates immediate traffic and gets you instant exposure, possibly on the first page of search results.
  • You can target people who are searching for similar products.
  • You can choose the time, geographic location and position on the page.
  • You can target geographic locations and track data.

Bad things about PPC

  • You pay for every click. People may simply click through without any intention of buying.
  • PPC results show up in search results and it faces stiff competition
  • There is no guarantee that even finely crafted ads can lead to conversions.
  • Your ad, and therefore your company, is visible so long as you have an ongoing PPC campaign. Suspend it, and you go off the radar.
  • PPC does nothing to enhance your reputation

Good things about SEO

  • Search engines rank your website based on your search engine optimization strategies. Some visitors may prefer such listings to PPC and are more likely to click through, especially when they wish to obtain more information.
  • Even if you suspend SEO operations for a while, your presence is there on search engines.
  • Keep pushing it and SEO will result in the increasing volume of organic, convertible traffic. Plus, you establish a robust online presence and reputation and keep improving with the passage of time.

Bad things about SEO

  • It requires a good  website to serve as the base of SEO operations.
  • It is not easy to get to the first page and the first five at the top of it. It is much harder to keep that position.
  • It takes time ranging from 6 months to a year for your site to show up on the first page of search results and if you are not doing it alone, you are paying SEO people to keep working on your website regardless.

Mixing SEO and PPC

SEO is excellent and so is PPC. The smart thing that expert marketers do is to mix the two together. PPC gives you analytics on keyword performance and keywords used in searches. So use that data for improving your SEO keyword content. Or vice versa, SEO experts are likely to conduct research and then decide keywords for the SEO campaign. Use those keywords in your PPC campaigns because these keywords have been clicked and converted. Lets say you start a PPC campaign. Visitors search using keywords and your ad shows up and they click through. You get data on their behavior on your website and that helps you to modify websites to lead to longer, better engagement.

Analytics show results of pages that generate most revenue. You can focus on these pages as well as others that need improvement. Keyword research tools can maybe help you make an educated guess about which keywords to use in your SEO, but PPC reports are data driven. You can create SEO plan using keywords that have actually delivered traffic. Which is actually showing us that it might be best to use PPC first to get raw data and quick results and then use that data to build your website for a long run results of SEO building.