Imagine two well- dressed people sharing an umbrella. The umbrella is Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and the dapper individuals underneath are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements. These two are the primary tools for anyone seeking to market in the search engine realm. The purpose of both is to drive traffic to your website through usage of search engines. However, these individuals are dressed differently- they go about their purpose in distinctive ways. In a nutshell, SEO is often considered as organic and PPC is thought of as advertising. The remainder of this article will describe the differences.

Search engine optimization uses the content of your website to work with a search engine’s parameters. Use of highly searchable terms within your website’s content will result in a higher ranking on the search engine’s results page (SERPs). With SEO, instead of paying the search engine, you hire an SEO consultant to maximize your site. There are 3 popular ways to go about maximizing your site for search engines: 1) On-page optimization, 2) Back links, and 3) social media and blogs.

• On-page optimization recreates your webpage to appear relevant and clean for search engines.
• Back links connect your site to other sites, thus using their authority to boost yours.
• Social Media and blogs increase your web presence and searchability by keeping content fresh and your website active.

When you perform a search, you likely notice the advertisements appearing on the top or side of the results page. These adverts are a marketing strategy called pay-per-click, named so because each time a user clicks on the ad, the web owner then owes a bit of money to the search engine. This cost is determined by three factors: 1) auction style bid, 2) quality score, and 3) keyword seasonality.

• The auction bid is based on how much the competition is paying. The more popular the keyword, the more costly it will be.
• The quality score of your website is determined by each search engine. The more authority you have, the less you pay.
• Some keywords are popular by season or holiday. Christmas toys or Valentines gift will cost more near their date of popularity.

Now that you’re informed, you can see how both PPC and SEO have benefits. Whether you choose to use them both together, separately, in succession, or in isolation will depend on your needs and your budget. Good luck! But then again, with SEO and PPC, you won’t need it.

How it works:

Large retail companies like Amazon or Ebay place banner ads on your site and every time someone visiting clicks on the banner ad, your website is given a credit that results in a small fee. These fees vary with each deal and each website.

This program can be slow and tedious usually paying only pennies per click. It is also very easy to involve your site in these programs as it works to both of your advantage.

These programs are also very user friendly and easy to sign up your site. The most common is Google’s Adsense and its companion Adwords. Pay to click displays plain text advertisements on your site and pays a small fee if someone follows through with a click on the ad.

Both of these methods of making money from your website, require that your site have a high volume of consistent visitors. Once you reach a happy medium of consistent viewers to your site and partnerships that generate advertising dollars, you have reached your goal of making money from your website.

Participants in the study included 24 “experienced users” of both Google and Bing, all between 18 and 54 years old. Each performed eight searches; four on Google and four on Bing.

Regardless of whether the users were using Google or Bing search engine, all 24 participants looked at the organic search results for their queries. However, nearly 80% ignored the paid ads on the right side of the page. Participants spent more time looking on the left on Bing (2.9 seconds) than on Google (1.2 seconds). That means, ad placement among the top sponsored results on Google attracted 22% more attention than on Bing.

User Centric’s resources include the largest dedicated usability testing studio and most portable labs of any North American consulting firm.

Source and more details about this study: Eye Tracking Bing vs. Google: A Second Look

Image source: usercentric.com