PPC (Pay Per Click) and Natural Listings Article: PPC and natural listings stem from, directly affect and are directly affected by, your overall website optimization. Your cost for PPC advertising is established in large part, by the quality of the website it is advertising for. The quality of everything SEO and SEM, as well as how the users interact with the site, is responsible for your natural listings.
Natural listings are tool like anything else. They reduce SEM costs, add confidence to your potential customers and exert your dominance in your chosen industry. However, like we talked about in SEO goals, they have to be used wisely.
PPC has to be viewed as a sustained value added service to the site. This can be used to forward your goals for growth or to generate conversions. PPC has the power to send well defined, quality traffic to your site, and the search engines monitor that. If a qualified user comes to your site and traffics the site well, that is a powerful statement that you deserve to be ranked higher.
Search engine rankings, to some extent, can be bought with either time or money, sometimes both. But ultimately the quality of your site and marketing efforts will decide if you stay there. This is why I can't stress enough to stay focused and build realistic SEO & SEM goals. Most people treat natural listings as a trophy they must attain.
I need to reiterate: your focus should be sales and conversions, which may include some number one listings, but those listings are a tool to increase conversions, not the focus of the campaign. Nor is it a "score" or a trophy. I cannot stress this enough.
