Contributed by Scott Daughtry, SEO Specialist, NetQoS

Most website owners eventually come to the conclusion that to have any success getting traffic to their site, they need to do one of three things: optimize the pages of their website (SEO), start a pay-per-click campaign (SEM), or do both. In an effort to save money, most people will tell you to go the free route first – that is, work to optimize your website and hope that your pages get indexed high in the search engines. I’m here to tell you a couple of reasons you may want to consider shelling out some money on a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign first.

For those of you with limited budgets, you may be asking yourself – why spend money on a PPC engine like Google Adwords before taking advantage of every possible opportunity to get free listings? My best answer to this question is that doing so will save you weeks or possibly months of frustration. How? When you begin optimizing your website, you have no idea what will drive potential customers to your site, let alone what will prompt them to buy. Sure, you hopefully will do some keyword research ahead of time, but you still won’t know which keywords will ultimately bring you the targeted, motivated traffic you are looking for. Aside from that, you have no idea if Google or other search engines will even list your pages anywhere near the top (check out the chart below to see why being above the fold on page 1 is essential in a competitive b2b environment). In the end you may end up spending a lot of time and effort waiting to gain that first page result only to be disappointed because you show up on page 10. Alternately you may show up on page 1, but end up getting the wrong type of traffic resulting in few or no leads/sales.

Eye tracking study: Areas of the page searchers focus on

Now let’s consider that you do the same keyword research, but set up a Google Adwords account first and wait to optimize your site. With Adwords you can be up and running ads in minutes instead of waiting days or weeks to get indexed by Google in the organic (free) listings. You can also guarantee visibility within the eye tracking sweet spot from the chart above. Now you can begin testing. You can test which keywords are getting the most conversions, which ad copy resonates best with your target market, and which landing page copy convinces people to fill out their information. Once you begin gathering this data, you can begin transitioning the things that work to your website; you can now be confident that your optimization efforts will not be a waste of time. It’s like having the ultimate focus group; people from all over are telling you which keywords they are interested in when looking for products or services you sell. You will now know exactly which web copy to add to your pages to get the most conversions - it is no longer a guessing game. Authors and publishing companies test book titles with Adwords before going to print. Entrepreneurs use adwords to test product ideas before manufacturing the product. Adwords is the ultimate market research tool; if you look at it this way, it is well worth the money spent. Of course this all depends on whether you use Adwords to its full potential and testing capabilities. My next article will discuss the first step to creating a successful Google Adwords campaign – Keyword Research.