SEO, PPC and Analytics…Oh My!
Alright, since I love marketing and it is my life, I decided I would include a section on PPC, SEO and analytics and how all three are beneficial to have and work synchronously.
What is PPC?
So a lot of you may hear the term “PPC” and may not know what it is. Well, firstly, it stands for Pay per click. If you have ever ‘googled’ something and had a bunch of results come up, there were probably a couple of results (depending on the word or phrase you are searching for) that were displayed in a beige box at the top above the natural search results. These are paid search results. What I mean by that is the companies that you see in that box have paid Google to have their company come up first when the person is searching for their keywords. So, if you were a shoe store and you wanted to guarantee that people were going to see your sight every time they searched for that term, you would just purchase that word and it would then be displayed up at the top. Every time a person clicks on those sites, the company makes its money back in ROI, or return on investment. It is something that not only Google offers but other search engine companies offer.
What is SEO?
Below the paid search results are the natural search results or more commonly known as SEO, search engine optimization. These search results come up naturally when searching for words or phrases. The order in which the results are displayed is referred to as ‘Page Rank.’ This simply means where on the page the word or phrase is ranking. This has many factors that influence it such as keywords, title tags, metatags, authoritative-ness and so on. Basically, the better a site is and the more on target they are with other sites, the higher their rank. So if the Gap is doing something to their site to make their results come up higher on the list depending on the keywords. So, you will want to make sure that your website has all of these things in sync with competitors.
What is AdSense?
Adsense is similar to PPC in that AdSense uses key words as well, just like PPC. The difference comes in when they use those keywords. In AdSense, the company (or web designer) will create ads for your company to entice them to click on it. Once you click on it, they get money for it. Now, while the resource may be useful, a lot of adsense is not very useful, in my opinion.
What are Analytics?
So now that we have discussed the three components of Internet marketing, let’s put them together! So even though these are three different parts of internet marketing, they all work with each other. In some opinions and beliefs, they feel that without analytics there would be nothing. I agree! I think that analytics are the basis for everything else in marketing. You CANNOT make logical changes and decisions until you look at the numbers. Why? Well say you are looking at your traffic report for your website. You want to possibly change a word that you bought with PPC. Before changing, you must look at the numbers first to see if there were any trends. It could very well be that a number that didn’t do so well on month was because of reason XYZ. So you see, all four work harmoniously together!
