Natural or Sponsored Listings - Which should
you target?
Most webmasters assume that their aim should be to make their
sites top of the natural listings on the basis that they will then
get traffic for free. In practice as soon as you start
thinking about a plan of action, you also have to start making
choices.
Which listings?
You don't even want to be top of every search phrase.
You must first decide which search phrases are going to be bring
relevant traffic. This will be a lot easier if you start
by defining a niche target market. After all, most sites
should be capable of getting a top position on their own company
name but the broader the phrase the harder it will be to
achieve. If you target 'search engine' you are competing
with 240 million sites world-wide. As a small business I
wouldn't put money on those odds.
How competitive are you?
Normally there are 20 positions on a Google search results
page - 10 natural and 10 sponsored. You can occupy 2
slots, one in each section. If you don't occupy both, you
are allowing your competitors more weight. You can also
influence strongly the relative positions on the page. A
recent estimate suggested 60% of clicks were on natural listings
and some have claimed that the proportion is as high as 85%.
Personally I believe that the closer the visitor is to a
purchasing decision, the more likely they are to click on a
sponsored advert because those are the ones linked to immediate
potential suppliers.
How quickly do you want to obtain results?
Improving natural rankings requires a process that will
normally take months. The results are always uncertain and
rankings achieved are always liable to change as a result of
competitive action, search engine algorithms, or your own
website development. Sponsored positions can be obtained
inside 15 minutes and are largely under your direct control.
What are your financial objectives?
Cash flow is particularly critical for small businesses.
The safest way to build sales is to use sponsored advertising to
generate visitors quickly and check that your site generates
immediate profit from them. When that is assured, you can
first increase the advertising budget so long as you maintain
immediate profitability, then invest in the longer process of
site optimisation, content development, linking strategies and
other promotion to improve your natural rankings.
Sponsored search advertising is getting more expensive as more
businesses learn how profitable it can be and therefore increase the
competition for the best positions. Natural listings are not
free because good results normally require significant resources of
time and money.
Personally Web 4 Marketing relies entirely on natural rankings to
generate enquiries - but then, I can only serve a limited number of
clients at any one time and every month I update the site and add
newsletters like this one. If I wanted to grow the business or
launch a new one, sponsored advertising would be the key element.
Talk to you next month,
Stephen Orr
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