Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Should You Pay For PPC If You Are Already #1 Organically In Google?


Attorneys with very high organic ranking websites will occasionally ask me if they should also be paying for PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns for the same search term. In a previous post on why you need to be #1 in Google, I had pointed to recent studies by Jupiter search that showed that 87% of traffic from the search engine results pages go to organic results while 79% of people will ignore PPC advertising all together or only click on them AFTER they have exhausted the organic results first. In short, by asking the question of whether or not you should run PPC with a high organic ranking is basically asking if you want the additional 13% of the search results...or one would think.

Well, an interesting article was just released from Search Engine Land that ran a test on exactly this question and here are some of the key findings from their test:

- When running PPC with high organic results, there was an increase of just shy of 20% in combined clicks
- When removing the cannibalization effect of same page results, the increase in clicks worked out to around 12% (Ironically very close to Jupiter's research numbers f 13%)
- ROI is largely positive for running PPC along with organic results but this is ultimately a function of costs and returns.

How About PPC Landing Page Conversions?

One of the arguments for using PPC is that you can direct the clicks to nearly any webpage you want - unlike organic listings where the search engines (with SEO help from you) determine where the clicks go. These specialized "landing pages" tend to have higher conversions since they are designed specifically just for converting website traffic from PPC ads. Based on this Linkstudy, the conversion ratios of the landing pages were typically around 10% higher than organic search pages.

So What Should You Do?

In summary, if you are considering running PPC along with your high organic placement, try running the same tests as they did in this study and see if the ROI is there for your desired search term/s. If your ROI is positive, stick with it. If not, stay with your organic search results.

To learn more about lawyer marketing online and how to better market your law firm, please contact the SEO Consultant Firm today to see how we can help you...

5 comments:

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