brand marketing blog

The debate rages about which form of search engine marketing is most effective/profitable - PPC (pay per click) or organic search engine marketing.

In a recent post by Valerie Mellema, “The Last Word in PPC vs. Article Marketing”, she explores the dynamics of PPC vs. article marketing (an organic search engine marketing techniques). Her post presents some interesting ROI statistics that may debunk several well held SEM myths.

She cites research by Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D. which indicated that 42% of users selected the #1 search listing for their result, leaving 58% that selected another Top 10 Result. The #1 site listed achieved the majority of clicks.

Other related statistics (with sources from ComScore, Webxico, iProspect, SEOResearcher and Hotchkiss, Garrison, and Jensen) concluded that 77% of search users choose organic listings over PPC ads. Other studies suggested that organic results generated 25% higher conversion rates than equivalent Pay-Per-Click (PPC) listings.

The major issue that I have with PPC is that it has no longevity. You get bang for buck whilst you are spending large, but the minute you pull your ads your enquiry rate falls off. This is no different to most traditional offline advertising mediums, but that’s the topic of another post that I’m working on.

Article marketing can be a very effective way to create excellent inbound links as well as to generate qualified traffic to your website, hopefully resulting in lots of sales enquiries. Here are some popular article submission sites:

- Article King Pro
- GoArticles
- eZine Articles
- Zimbio
- Buzzle

I should add that generating traffic to your site is only the start of the conversion process. Unless your landing page encourages/entices the visitor to take appropriate action, all your good search engine work, organic or paid for, will have been in vain.