An alphabet soup of website visibility

Your website is the public face of your company and perhaps the most effective advocate for your services.

But in order for your website to do its job, it has to be seen.

Search engines, such as Google and Bing, exist to match keywords or phrases with relevant websites.

When a prospect does a search related to your business, you want your website to sit at the top the results page. Greater visibility means more web traffic.

SEO (search engine optimization), an organic process for gaining rank, can improve your website's position. But many advisors aren't keen on spending time on SEO. So, are there any alternatives?

What is PPC?

A great alternative to SEO is to buy your popularity with pay-per-click links or PPC.

PPC advertisements, paid for by you, appear at the very top of search results, beating out the organic results, which appear below. As the name suggests, you pay only when your link is clicked.

A PPC approach to gaining rank means not having to tinker with your website to fit an ever-changing algorithm. You can direct traffic to pages that aren't built around keywords, and you have complete control over the content of your ad. PPC is quick, easy and guaranteed to effectively increasing the visibility of your website.

Try a combo

There are pros and cons to both SEO and PPC. SEO can be a long and involved process with less certainty of success, while PPC can be expensive but look cheap, lacking in a kind of "speak for itself" credibility. When deciding on a marketing strategy, it's important to consider your firm's time, manpower and budgetary constraints.

It's also worth considering a combination of SEO and PPC to get the job done. By implementing a PPC option first, you can gather information from your target audience to aid in your SEO efforts. Or, if you've already established SEO but your firm is offering a time-sensitive service or product, the addition of PPC can be an excellent way to promote it.

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