SEO – Organic vs Paid | How to grow a company

SEO has maintained a well established form of boosting a brands online presence in recent years. Working through both organic forms and paid searches, businesses now have the opportunity to gain the competitive advantage over one another if they are willing to invest time and money.

An advanced web ranking study carried out in 2015 found that on the first search engine results page (SERP), the top 5 results account for 67.60% of all clicks. The following 5 results then only account for 3.73%

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As a result, marketeers and SEO specialists have worked to analyse the varying aspects of search that need to be improved to boost a company’s placing:

  • Relevancy
  • Quality content
  • User experience
  • Site speed
  • Cross-device compatibility
  • Internal linking
  • Authority
  • Social

 

Relevancy – The mid 90’s saw the development of the PageRank algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in an attempt to improve relevancy of search results. For a company to then come higher up on a SERP it would be within it’s best interest to increase it’s page ranking number to appear as a result for more searches.

Quality of content – Regular publishing of quality content has been found to align with search engines long form content algorithms rather then forcing keywords into content to improve SERP results. If a company is to improve their SERP standing, regular content of high quality will need to be posted.

Site speed & Cross compatibility – With the volume of online sites increasing at an exponential rate, page loading times is becoming a critical differentiating factor. If companies are to stand out, it may be in their best interest to shift to an accelerated mobile page (AMP). This used in conjunction with a site that is functional on all devices can substantially boost online standings.

Internal linking & Authority – Companies should also aim to have easy to use interfaces with posts that push traffic around the site, allowing them to be ranked as a more ‘trusted’ site. This not only boosts site authority but can increase overall traffic.

Social – Finally is the resource of social media, as inferred by ‘The search engine optimisation bible’, social media optimisation strategies should be integrated into SEO workflow to boost traffic and eventually link back to the site or SERP.

 

Pay-per-click (PPC)

As with all SEO methodologies, PPC has limitations and benefits. Bidding for certain keywords can often cause exceedingly high costs for companies to out bid one another, with some companies even having dedicated teams to check rankings and bid accordingly.

It is important for companies to note that many search engines now recognise PPC ads. Meaning that even though you may have a high ranking with one search engine due to a successful PPC campaign, this not may be the case with other search engines. This means that it may be necessary to run multiple PPC campaigns with different search engines to improve overall ranking, however this can come at a large cost to the business.

Companies must learn to use both organic search and paid advertising synergistically if they are to create an effective and cost efficient campaign as they grow.

 

 

 

 

McIntyre, E.S., 2015. Search engine optimization. ON October11.
Page, L., Brin, S., Motwani, R., & Winograd, T. (1999). The PageRank citation ranking: bringing order to the web. Retrieved from Stanford University website: http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf
https://www.ampproject.org/
Ledford, J.L., 2015. Search engine optimization bible (Vol. 584). John Wiley & Sons.
www.searchenginewatch.com/2016/01/21/seo-basics-22-essentials-you-need-for-optimizing-your-site/
Khan, G.F., 2015. Seven layers of social media analytics: Mining business insights from social media text, actions, networks, hyperlinks, apps, search engine, and location data. CreateSpace.
Berman, R. and Katona, Z., 2013. The role of search engine optimization in search marketing. Marketing Science32(4), pp.644-651.
Killoran, J.B., 2013. How to use search engine optimization techniques to increase website visibility. IEEE transactions on professional communication56(1), pp.50-66.

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