Top 3 Reasons You Should Consider Paid Search Engine Optimization for Your Practice

Does your website need more traffic? Are you considering about doing paid search, but you’re not sure it’s right for you. Your caution is well-deserved because pay per click has its drawbacks, but depending on your situation it might be just the thing for your business.

Here are the three reasons for doing paid search, and the three reasons why you may consider skipping it.

3 Best Reasons for Doing Paid Search

1) You Need Traffic Immediately. If you’ve got to get some traffic coming into your site, and there’s no time for organic search efforts to manifest and no time to build a social community, paid search is your best shot. Another side benefit is that you can turn paid search off whenever you want. This can be handy if your site goes down or your payment processing system stalls.

2) You can afford a high cost per visitor.  If your website’s visitor value is more than you’re paying per click, you’ve got a cash machine on your hands. Even if you’re just breaking even, the extra traffic paid search delivers can be used to increase the size of your average sale, or to build up a profitable back end sales stream. That’s how the smartest marketers come to dominate their niches.

3) You want to test something before you roll out to a larger list. Let’s say you’ve got a new white paper and there are a couple of different titles that would work for it. You could use paid search to run a landing page test on several different titles. Then you could know which title was the winner before you promoted it to your house list. Nice.

3 Best Reasons to Skip Paid Search

1) You don’t have the budget. Don’t get into paid search unless you can sustain it for at least two months or more. Also, take the keyword bid estimates with a grain of salt. PPC can be very expensive, especially if your account is new and your ads are untested.

2) You don’t have the expertise. There are no refunds in paid search. If you accidentally blow $10,000 because you didn’t understand negative keywords, or how to use phrase and exact match, or your landing page wasn’t working, there is no recourse. That money is gone.

3) You can wait to let your organic search efforts pay off. This is especially true if you have a local business, because it will take much less effort to get to the top of the search engine results so long as you do your local search optimization efforts right. A few hours of solid SEO work could save you thousands of pay per click costs.

Paid search works best for new users when they are patient. If you do seem to be a good fit for PPC, start with about 5-10 carefully chosen keywords and spend a lot time getting them to work. Follow best practices like writing ad copy specific to each keyword and creating custom landing pages for each keyword. Get your short list of primary keywords working. Then expand to a larger list, and then to other networks, and then to other paid search platforms.

What To Do If Paid Search Won’t Work for You

If you’re just not ready to do paid search at all, there are plenty of alternatives, particularly through organic search and social media. Blogging is a terrific way to increase traffic, generate content and build brand identity all at the same time. SEO (search engine optimization) can be done affordably and effectively with a few well-chosen directory listings and some strategic backlinks. There’s no need to commit to the paid search model if you can commit even 3-5 hours a week to building free traffic.

What do you do to drive traffic to your website? What kind of results have you had? Share with us in the comments below.

Thanks for reading! Be Enchanting!