PPC Suggestions: Cost Comparison Versus Blogging for Small Businesses

One of the things that always gets me in online marketing is the number of small businesses that purchase PPC campaigns and get little value from it. I'm not going to go off on PPC, because there is a time and a place for it. Some companies use PPC very effectively to drive millions of dollars of revenue. My view on PPC is that if you're not an expert, follow these simple rules.

1) Have a Product to Sell or an Instant Transaction: Don't use PPC for brand recognition without a larger campaign behind it. If you are selling services that don't require an instant purchase, or if you are trying to drive traffic so you can make money advertising, PPC is probably not for you. This doesn't mean PPC can't work for you, but you have to know how to make it work in a full campaign, and that's more complicated than just buying keywords (or paying someone to buy them for you).

2) MAKE LANDING PAGES: This one baffles me. There is no excuse for having your PPC campaign point to your website or blog. It takes very little time to create a landing page that directs clickers to buy a product. Sending them to your website, where they then have to search for a product is a waste of time.

3) If PPC Works for You, Plan For When It Doesn't: You should hear this. PPC Campaigns are only as successful as your dumbest competitor. If PPC works for you, it can work for your competitors. When they realize this, they enter the PPC space and bid up your keywords. This means that any advantage is short-lived, and the cost of PPC grows over time while the value declines. What are you doing to plan past your PPC success? And worse, what if you're the last one in the pool?

A few words on longevity. I worked with a client last year on a birth announcement service that was strictly online. We stopped blogging in August, but since then over 1700 people** have visited the site from search engine referrals, and even dormant, 10-15 a day come to the site. The cost to keep this blog up is $50/year. Do that math. Having once blogged, and even on a dormant site, the client is getting a PPC value of $.009 per visitor that should last several years. And they do nothing to maintain it.

The value of blogging is long-term returns. The value of PPC is immediacy.

Regular blogging yields even higher returns. StlRecruiting.com brings in 80-90 referrers/week just from the search engines dredging up old content. That's a PPC value of $.001 per visitor for work already completed. When I first started, I targeted people with SEO and PPC budgets for blog campaigns. It was my primary method of measuring metrics. When pitching firms on social media, compare the returns on your traffic and SEO ranking with that of the PPC, SEO, and press mentions (from PR). You'll find your sales pitch more compelling.

**I realize this is a small example. 1700 visitors isn't a lot, but it's relevant to that particular site. Blogging increased traffic to the site 150% when it was active, and drove the rank of the site up in relevant search terms.

Changes In Google Algorithm Suggest The Need For Corporate Blogging

Google has gone and done it again. Two very important changes in the way that Google ranks webpages have rocked the SEO world, and bloggers, especially corporate bloggers, stand to benefit.

First, SEO Roundtable says Google is no longer counting unlimited subdomains as separate sites. Subdomains in the future will now be treated as folders, a major blow to websites that create extra sites like news.company.com and careers.company.com.

From the WebmasterWorld thread:News flash from Las Vegas PubCon. Matt Cutts informed us that Google will very soon begin treating subdomains and subdirectories the same in this fashion: there will be only 2 total urls from a domain in any set of search results, so no more getting 3, 4 or however many spots via subdomains. We didn't get any more information than just that basic heads-up.

In the future, the company will only have its main domain, and one subdomain ranking high in the Google SERP's.

That's a pretty big deal if you built your search engine optimization strategy on a single brand. In the future, the need to create several different brands will become a major part of a companies SEO strategy, and the easiest way to create multiple domains is powering them with blog software. For small companies, the opportunity to create an outsized presence on line is a big win. For large companies, the need to build high quality blogs with their list of domain names just became a necessity. Expect to see a rise in auction prices as well.

The second piece of news is that Google is moving away from high-ranking sites, and increasing the value of recent material.

Google Operating System points out something interesting in Google’s algorithm recently: a preference in favoring recent content. The example provided would seem to favor the conclusion; TCP/IP’s anniversary today has resulted in Google preferencing recent posts, including from Digg, over informative articles related to the search term such as Wikipedia who would have normally had the top or near to the top position.

No more living off your SEOwork from three years ago. If you're not writing regularly, you're not going to rank on the first page of Google. This is a positive event for the consumer, which means less four year old webpages, but it's great news for bloggers, whose steady stream of information is going to rank even higher in the search engines.

SEO for 2008 just changed, and blogs are going to be the answer for many companies. The old saw that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, just got proven true. If you're one of those corporate marketing, technology, or communication executives that wonder you're going to adjust, the time to speak to a social media company is now. I guess now is the time to remind you that we've corporate blog consultants?

If you're in St Louis, and you're looking for a social media consultant, you can't afford not to call.