Pay Per Click refers to online advertisements which are used to direct traffic to your website. This is a common tactic used in Search Engine Marketing and improves optimisation for your site to get picked up on a larger amount of search engine results pages (SERPs). These adverts generate more clicks for your website. Just as the name suggests each time your advert gets a click you pay the search engine for the advert space. This may seem like it could get costly but if you think about it this way it rather makes sense. The more clicks you get the more business may be coming in and the more money you will make.

These adverts work like an auction where you can bid what you could pay for the click .There are many different search engines that provide the service of online adverts. One of the most successful is Google AdWords. It is free to sign up for Google AdWords and you only pay when you get a click. It allows you to have a daily budget which means you can monitor how much you will pay for the advert.

We believe that PPC is very useful and very successful if managed correctly. We will monitor your advert and its success and adapt it to the needs of your website.  There are a few advantages that we consider are worth the money when it comes to PPC adverts:

Instant results – PPC is the fastest way of driving traffic to your website.

Dynamic and flexible – PPC allows you to design and control your campaign to meet your business needs. You can control how much you spend, how long your ad runs for and under which searches etc. You can even track the performance of your ad and change it depending on how it performs.

Your Budget – Whether you have a large budget and don’t mind spending a hefty sum on advertisements, or if you have a low budget and have to skimp on advertisement prices PPC can work for you. It is free to sign up for PPC on most search engine sites and you only pay when somebody clicks on your advert. You can also control how much you spend and set a budget daily, weekly or monthly.

Locked on target – PPC allows you to set your target audience so that your advert is directed at only your potential customers. You can specify language, location, demographics such as gender or age etc., and you can even specify time of day and day of the week for your ad.

Level the playing field – PPC brings all businesses onto the same level. It means that all businesses have the same chance to be found and clicked on. So whether you are a huge multi-tiered business with an already huge client base or if you are a small scale, local business just starting out you can have an equal chance of winning a keyword bid and landing on the front page of a search engine.

Although the concept of PPC is simple to understand, you should not underestimate the power of a good consultant who understands how to manage and optimise your adverts. At OBC we know the best way to win those keyword bid wars and land on everyone’s front page of search engines.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are terms that can be confusing and many people understand them as interchangeable. However, each is a completely different service which works together for optimisation of a sites online reputation. The main difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO is simply a component of SEM.

SEM: This is the broader of the two terms. It refers to the different options available and used in order to increase the visibility of a site in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is achieved through advertising and optimisation. We talk about increasing the traffic on a site. The more traffic a site gets the better their visibility becomes. SEM uses paid search such as PPC (Pay Per Click) (*Hyperlink to PPC page here) listings or advertisements.

SEO: This term refers to the strategies and tactics used to ensure that a site is visible for search engines. It aims to improve the chances that the site will be found in a search in any given search engine. SEO comprises two different but important activities (These are just a few activities that are used in SEO, the list goes on and on):

On-page SEO – incorporating selective keywords naturally into title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, alt text, etc. Blog posts and page copy should be written and optimized with quality. The page’s URLS should be clean and formatted correctly. Page load speed should be optimised. Google authorship should be incorporated. There should be social sharing integration within your content.

Off-page SEO – You should create a high quality, natural backlink profile. This means having other high quality/authoritative sites link to your site naturally. There should be social sharing signals and social bookmarking, such as Stumbleupon or Reddit.

Each of these terms is important to understand and to utilize if your site is to become successful and well recognised in its field. There is an ongoing debate as to the benefits of each and which one is considered a better marketing tactic. Many people do feel that SEO is sufficient as a tactic because it makes the site better for both search engines and users. However, if you feel that you want to increase your visibility just that much more SEM is vital. We believe that no SEM campaign is complete without SEO. If you are going to spend money an SEM campaign and have advertisements and paid placement don’t forget that SEO should be your first step in promoting your site. Your site is your mothership and is the first point of contact between you and your customers. Therefore, it should be optimised efficiently so that it appears in more SERPs.

When it comes to optimisation, search engines such as Google look at a long list of features which your site should have and how well your site ranks in terms of these features. These features fall into the following categories:

Overall – The overall score for this website.

Accessibility – How accessible the website is to mobile and disabled users.

Experience – How satisfying the website is likely to be for users.

Marketing – How well marketed and popular the website is.

Technology – How well designed and built the website is.

We will monitor your ranking for these search engines and help you to adapt your strategy accordingly.

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