Blue Ember Design » Search Engine Optimization

PPC or SEO: Which is Best for My Company?

Garrett St. John — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:00:24 +0000

Many companies, especially in the current tough economy, are looking at their marketing budgets and are asking a very important question: “Where can we spend our marketing dollars and make the largest impact?”

When making this decision it’s important to consider that both PPC advertising and SEO have their merits. At the same time, they also have dissimilar levels of commitment (both in time and money) and use entirely different methods for determining their success. We’ll look into those differences here in an effort to help in the decision-making process.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Advertising online is an easy and quick way to drive traffic to a website. If executed correctly, traffic will arrive on highly targeted keywords and improve sales conversion rates. As long as the advertising bills are paid, website traffic should stay at its elevated level. However, stop paying and they’ll cut traffic just as fast as it started.

So what does this mean for a company? It means that pay per click advertising is a great way to instantly generate new traffic. As long as the campaign is active, the traffic will flow. This model makes cost per click (CPC) a perfect way to determine the return on investment (ROI) because of its distinct start/stop times and set number of marketing dollars spent.

Unlike pay per click advertising, these lines are not so clear with a search engine optimization campaign.

Search Engine Optimization

In most cases, it’s accurate to say that an SEO marketing campaign with a high quality search engine optimization company will result in a lower CPC than a pay per click advertising campaign. Here’s why:

Unlike pay per click advertising, search engine optimization is a lasting investment into the quality and success of a company’s website. There is no clear end to when an SEO campaign stops being effective. A 12-month campaign with an SEO professional that is halted due to budget issues will continue to exhibit improved results well after the work has entirely stopped. Depending on the industry, the competition, and the quality of the SEO, improved results could last for weeks or even potentially years. Because of the indefinite end to its results, cost per click is not an adequate way to determine the return on investment of an SEO campaign.

If the results are so long-lasting, why isn’t everyone going with SEO? Largely because there is a minimum required commitment to search engine optimization. A campaign can take weeks or months to start showing improved results and even more importantly will require patience, diligence and time to build into a highly successful campaign. If either time or money are limited, it’s likely that a pay per click advertising campaign is going to be the best short-term choice.

So Which is Right For My Company?

After reading this article, it should hopefully be clear that there are some core differences between how pay per click advertising and search engine optimization work and how their results should be quantified. Pay per click advertising campaigns have a hard start and end date, immediately drive targeted traffic, and have a simple formula to determine their ROI. Meanwhile, an SEO campaign may take longer to put into place at a higher initial cost, but the results will long outlast those of PPC advertising.

Want more information or need help? Blue Ember Design can build a quality Search Engine Optimization or PPC Advertising campaign for your company.

Polaris: Google Analytics on Your Desktop

Garrett St. John — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:55:31 +0000

As one of the leading tools for website traffic analysis, Google Analytics provides information about website visitors, traffic trends, search engine keywords, and LOTS more. Google provides a beautiful and easy-to-use web interface, but we wanted a readily available desktop application that was equally useful. Enter Polaris by Desktop Reporting.

Polaris is an Adobe AIR application which means that it will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux flawlessly. They offer a free version which allows viewing one account or an upgraded multi-account version for $15/year.

In the image above, you can see that many of the popular reports are right at your fingertips and delivered in Analytics-like graphical reports.

Also, selecting date ranges is available to focus on specific time periods. This is very convenient for viewing long-term reports as well as daily web trends.

There is even a great map view to show geographical hotspots for website traffic.

We highly recommend Polaris if you are website statistic freaks like us. It’s a beautiful interface with tons of information right on your desktop. You can download it now at http://www.desktop-reporting.com/polaris.html.

Image Source: Desktop Publishing

4 Reasons To Have a Company Blog

Garrett St. John — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:00:54 +0000

Why do you need a company blog? Isn’t blogging just for professional writers or angst-filled teenagers? Hardly. Here are four quality reasons that your company should have a blog.

Search Engine Ranking – Search engines love blogs. Why?
1. Sitemaps – A sitemap is a file which helps search engines locate URLs available for crawling. Most popular blogging software have a feature that does this automatically.
2. Pings – In terms of blogging, a ping is an automatic online notification that new content has been posted to a blog. This ping is often sent to web services like Technorati, Google, and others to notify them that the blog is updated and should be indexed.
3. Categories/Tags – Blog posts are often associated with categories and tags in order to group similar topics together. Effective categorizing and tagging will many times result in both better search engine rankings as well as more pageviews per visitor because of it’s similar content.
4. Fresh Content – Search engines love fresh content. An active website with regularly updated information will be indexed more frequently and likely be considered as more relevant in the longer term.
Customer Confidence – Visitors need a reason to trust your company as well as your services/products. A blog can be used to convey knowledge, expertise, and professionalism. The better a potential customer trusts a company, the more confident they will be in making a purchase.
Social Networking – Sites like MySpace and Facebook are typically considered to define “Social Networking”. While that is true in many ways, social networking is much more broad. Through a blog, a company can post information about their business, their product, or their industry and open it for conversation through comments. This back-and-forth on a common topic is great for generating new product ideas, improving existing services, providing support, and more.
Cost Effectiveness – To be able to create new, fresh content without a blogging or CMS platform can become costly. To produce content like a blog, tens or hundreds of individual pages would need to be created individually by a web designer. By using a blog, a company can save money in the longer term.

Let Blue Ember Design educate you on the details of blogging and get you started with your own custom blog design.