Not only will pay per click trial the keywords, it will also test the conversion rate of the website on the whole. You may find that one of the keywords has worked particularly well, bringing a large number of customers to your site, but they simply have not purchased from you. Now this could be because you have selected the wrong keyword, but assuming you went through all the relevant actions to pick them it may more likely imply that your website is not working well from a sales point of view. Is it clear how customers select their goods, is it clear how they can pay? Are the payment options diverse and simple, or are there lots of requests for information that is turning the customers away.

All this can be trialed and resolved in a very short space of time and then the more cost effective Online Marketing process of search engine optimization can replace it. It will almost certainly be cost effective to switch to this type of Online Marketing, particularly if you have a large number of keywords or a decent size client base on line. Pay per click can be very costly and quite misleading in terms of cost. The amount you spend on just one click through to your site may be reasonably low, say between £1 and £2. However if the quantity of people searching for your keyword or phrase are large, as they usually are on the net, you can end up with this turning into hundreds of pounds each week. Also it is usual to have different “campaigns” on the go at once. Although each of them on their own looks relatively low in value, when added together they make for a large bill.

The solution is to go for the pay per click at the start of your internet campaign, really test your site and get it running just the way you want it to. Then, when you are satisfied, start to use the services of a Website Optimization Company. Once they get a good Search Engine Placement for your keywords in the organic area of the listings you will start to see some much bigger numbers of enquiries come through to you for a lot less cost.

Using the Website Optimization Company is great for the medium to long term, but do carry out all your testing before spending money on search engine placement. If not it could cost you as much in wasted time and web re-design.

This whole system of advertising relies on the correct assortment of keywords – the words entered into the search engine by searchers in order to locate what they are looking for. If the business has chosen to have a pay per click deal on a keyword entered by a particular searcher the search engine will present the businesses advert along side the “organic” results normally listed in the main body of the page. Therefore it is vital that the business who wants to advertise it’s goods online chooses keywords that are being used by their potential customers to locate their products.

You can either use the services of an Online Marketing organisation to handle the pay per click advertising or you can do it within the organisation. The process is quite straightforward although a little time consuming and basically consists of the following:

Selecting a pay per click provider. These providers are mostly the search engines themselves and indeed pay per click adverts are repeatedly the largest income generators for the search engines. You may also discover that you can use a pay per click service on a price comparison website. Once you have opted for the provider you need to select the keywords that you are concerned with. Take care to make sure you have opted for the best possible ones to outline your product. The bulk of the search engines will have tools that you can use to choose the best ones in terms of number of searches.

Then it is vital to decide how much you want to pay each time someone clicks on your advert. The more you are disposed to pay the higher up the sponsored advert listing your Search Engine Placement will be. One pointer here is to look at the less popular but more precise keywords or phrases. If you can get one of these in your campaign you can achieve quite a low spend, get a average number of clicks but have a great conversion to sale rate from those more specific customers. To give an example, imagine you deal in “blue desert spoons” only, if you opt for a keyword of “spoons” you will get a large number of people searching but they may want any colour or sort of spoon. Of course the bulk of them you won’t be able to sell to as they don’t want a blue desert spoon. And yet you will have paid a high pay per click amount for a high number of clicks. Now if you chose “blue desert spoons” as your set of keywords you would get a lot less clicks due to the reduced number of searches and reduced airing of your ad. The people who do click through to your site however, would be ideal customers. Your sales will be high and your cost per click on such an unpopular set of keywords low.

So we can see that pay per click is a helpful tool but pay careful attention to the keywords you choose, help can be provided by an online marketing or Search Engine Optimisation Company if you’re finding it difficuly.

Firstly we will consider the pay per click method, a way of ensuring that you are visible to the people searching for your selected keywords by paying for a Search Engine Placement in the sponsored links section of the search results page. This system has a number of positive attributes. The biggest is the speed at which results are provided. To set up a campaign like this takes less than an hour and within one week you will have some very valuable information about how it is going. Visitors to your site will grow immediately and as long as you are selling what the searcher understood that you were selling from your pay per click ad your sales should follow not far behind.

Another great aspect of the pay per click method is that if you do happen to get something wrong, say in the selection of your keywords, it is noticeable very quickly. You can spot in a matter of days that although you are getting lots of clicks through to your website no one is purchasing anything. This will prompt you to reconsider your campaign before too much money has been chucked down the drain. It is possible with pay per click to limit your budget and therefore plan financially knowing that you will spend no more that the maximum you yourself have chosen.

On the down side it can still work out very costly as enquiries (clicks) go up, so too does your bill, whereas the cost of other forms of advertising remains constant no matter how many customers it brings. Also there is proven information that shows that organic Search Engine Placement listings attract ten times the number of clicks that pay per click do, suggesting that a lot of searchers would prefer not to use them.

Now taking a look at Search Engine Optimization we can see a much slower process. As it is organic or natural it generally takes a matter of weeks before any advancement is made and then as the clients website slowly climbs to page 1 the sales start to increase steadily over the following period. This is absolutely no quick fix. Another problem with it, unlike pay per click, is that because of it’s speed, if you do get the keywords slightly out at the outset you will have wasted a lot of effort before you actually spot the error. This is one of the reasons why getting some professional advice from a SEO Company may well be a cost effective idea.

On the up side if you do have an ongoing sales company the effort and the wait is absolutely worth it. The costs from the search engine optimization company, after an upfront fee are normally a small amount, say £15 per week for every keyword that reaches a search engine placement ranking on page 1. Bearing in mind the increased number of customers to your site from the organic listing this works out far far cheaper than pay per click.

So overall it seems that pay per click is excellent for immediate business and for one off sales. Whereas Search engine optimization would seem to lend itself to the online marketing of steady medium to long term business.

Initially pay per click should be used. It is very quick to set up, a well thought out campaign can be sorted within about an hour and the results are instantaneous. The beauty of this is that if you have got a couple of your keywords wrong this will quickly show up, giving you the opportunity to rectify the campaign as soon as you notice. The changes take place instantly and over the next day or two you can see if your alteration have fixed the issue.

Of course once you have got it all set up and running you could be forgiven for deciding to leave it as it is and leave pay per click as you only type of Online Marketing. This would be an error. Once the tried and tested keywords and phrases are doing the business and brining in the sales you can then turn your attention to the organic Search Engine Placement of your website by opting for some search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization should, when done correctly, position your website on the first page of the organic search results for the keywords that have already been used and proved by the pay per click. The searching public are ten times more likely to click on an organic website listing than on a pay per click advert. So although pay per click is great as a start the real winner is getting a good organic Search Engine Placement.

It does however take time for this type of service to take effect. Even though a lot of the keyword process will have been done there may be changes to your website and then the most important link generation work will begin. As this involves advertising your website across the internet it is a much slower process, requiring the search engine robots to build up a picture of your site as a popular, honest one.

It should be possible to recruit the services of a SEO Company to carry out the work. They will typically be a lot more efficient than you. Although they will require an initial fee for the ground work involved no further payment should be requested until they get your selected keywords on page one of the organic section.

As soon as this takes place the need for pay per click will disappear. As long as you have a contract with the Search Engine Optimization Company that you pay a set amount per week for each keyword that is shown on page 1, you will find that the cost of this service per sale is tiny compared to the pay per click which simply keeps increasing the more customers go to your site.

So in a nutshell, pay per click is ideal to get the ball rolling and try out the keywords out but search engine optimization represents the long term cost effective solution.