The Kona Impact Blog

Whenever you use Google to search for a term, you’ll see two different types of results. The pay-per-click listing are the top three listing in the beige box at the top of the page and the eight listings on the right side of the page. You may not see all these ads if you are searching for something that has no pay-per-click advertisers. Advertisers pay a fee to Google every time someone clicks on their ad in these positions. The results that begin below the beige box (if there is one) are organic search results. These are not advertisements and the website owners do not pay when someone clicks them.

Which is better, organic or pay-per-click? The answer is simple: both! And, it depends!

Let’s look at three marketing scenarios:

New Website, Invisible Online

If you have just launched your website, you’ll notice that you’re not found easily on the first page of Google search engine results. Unfortunately, many web designers don’t have a clue about how to design pages to be found and indexed properly. Even a skilled web design team like Kona Impact will tell clients that it can take weeks, if not a month or two to be found.

Initiating a pay-per-click advertising campaign can insure some immediate results. That is, your ads can begin running almost immediately. The downside, of course, is the cost in terms of money and time it takes to set up, run and sustain a pay-per-click campaign. That said, it’s really the best way to guarantee some immediate visitors to your website.

Established Website; Good Organic Visibility

If your webmaster has done his job and your website in the top five of Google results for the keywords you targeted, you are in pretty good shape. After all, it’s best to have people arrive at your website with no pay-per-click cost to you. If you have good coverage of most the keywords you want to target, it may be a good idea to leave well enough alone and put your marketing dollars elsewhere.

Imagine, however, that you have thirty of forty keywords you want to target (based on solid research, I hope), it will be difficult to do well on all of them. This is where you might want to supplement your organic search efforts with pay-per-click ads. You can buy yourself visibility, which is something you can do with organic search efforts.

Established Website; Want Control

If you are great at organic search and you want to have the greatest possibility of people searching for your business or products to find you, include pay-per-click advertising in your marketing plan. With eleven pay-per-click ad spaces available on Google for all keywords, web searchers can become overwhelmed with the choices and just click to top, pay-per-click results. Even if you are #1 for all your targeting keywords, you will still miss potential visitors who will click the pay-per-click ads. Likewise, if all you have going for you is a lot of pay-per-click advertising and no organic search results visibility, you are missing a lot of visitors.

So, in the best of all possible worlds, you are in a category that allows you to dominate the organic results and the pay-per-click advertising. In the worst of all possible worlds, your webmaster did a crummy job of designing your website and helping you with the content and you are invisible on the organic search search and you don’t have the time or budget for pay-per-click.

Unfortunately, Kona Impact sees websites every day that look nice but, for a number of reasons, do terrible on the organic search results. In effect, the only way the business owner can get visitors to her site is pay-per-click. This is a worst case scenario, as pay-per-click ads are best seen as a supplement to your organic search result marketing efforts and not a substitute for them.

The Kona Impact team has been making websites and running pay-per-click ads for over ten years. Put our experience to work for you. Call today at 808-329-6077.