The two ways you can market your products and services on the search engines are search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Both are great programs that can be extremely profitable, but there are situations when pay-per-click advertising just makes sense. Here are some times when pay-per-click is the right program to use.
Immediate results. You can start pay-per-click advertising immediately. You can setup a campaign in Google AdWords in a short time and start getting results. SEO requires content optimization and frequently requires that you build additional links to your site. SEO often takes months to generate results.

• Geo-targeting. PPC ads can be targeted to be displayed to prospects based on their geographic location. For businesses that operate within a specific geographic area, PPC provides a method to target ads based on a business’s geographic market. You can target Google ads to show in certain states, towns, or even zip codes. SEO can be difficult to target to specific geographic areas. It doesn’t make sense to show your ads nationally if your business only serves a limited, local market.
• Initial Investment. PPC does not require a large investment to get started. SEO typically requires website copy modifications and may require that you obtain additional links to your website. For these reasons, pay-per-click usually requires less initial investment.
• Marketing intelligence. PPC lets you test a large number of keywords to see which ones convert best. Then you can eliminate those keywords that don’t work. On the other hand, development of an SEO campaign requires that you define the keywords before implementing the SEO campaign. Businesses planning an SEO campaign may want to run a PPC campaign first to determine which keywords they want to target.
• Time sensitive offers. PPC advertising can be started and stopped on specific dates which makes it the ideal way to promote special events as well as seasonal and limited-time sales.
• Competition. Pay-per-click campaigns let you compete with other websites regardless of size. If you’re trying to develop an SEO campaign to compete with large sites, or sites that have been running SEO campaigns for a long time, it can often take months to achieve good results.
• Top of page positioning. Google typically places three to four ads at the top of each results page. This means that your ad will be seen without scrolling down the page.
• No long term commitment. Google AdWords requires no commitment timeframe. You can stop a campaign at any time, although we recommend that you plan on running a campaign for 90-180 days to see if it’s profitable.
• Protection against algorithm updates. You can’t be certain that an organic search result will remain in its current position. Over the years, major updates, such as Panda and Penguin, have caused serious disruptions to organic search engine results.
• Target more and specific keywords. You can set your campaign to display ads for any number of keywords, and can keep you ads from showing for specific keywords. So you can advertise for “green widgets”, but not have your ads show for “free green widgets”.

Search engine advertising works for many businesses. If it didn’t, businesses would not use it. According to Search Engine Land, search advertising spending in the US is expected to increase 24 percent over the next three years, from $36.69 billion in 2017 to $45.63 billion in 2019.

If you are wondering if pay-per-click advertising might work for your business, give us a call at 817-545-1188 or complete the contact form and we’ll help you understand if this is a good solution for your business.