Background: It is imperative that commercial websites should rank highly in search engine result pages because these provide the main entry point to paying customers. There are two main methods to achieve high rankings: search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) systems. Both require a financial investment – SEO mainly at the beginning, and PPC spread over time in regular amounts. If marketing budgets are applied in the wrong area, this could lead to losses and possibly financial ruin.Objectives: The objective of this research was to investigate, using three real-world case studies, the actual expenditure on and income from both SEO and PPC systems. These figures were then compared, and specifically, the cost per acquisition (CPA) was used to decide which system yielded the best results.Methodology: Three diverse websites were chosen, and analytics data for all three were compared over a 3-month period. Calculations were performed to reduce the figures to single ratios, to make comparisons between them possible.Results: Some of the resultant ratios varied widely between websites. However, the CPA was shown to be on average 52.1 times lower for SEO than for PPC systems.Conclusion: It was concluded that SEO should be the marketing system of preference for e-commerce-based websites. However, there are cases where PPC would yield better results – when instant traffic is required, and when a large initial expenditure is not possible.
Background: No empirical work was found on how marketing expenses compare when used solely for either the one or the other of the two main types of search engine marketing. Objectives: This research set out to determine how the results of the implementation of a pay-per-click campaign compared to those of a search engine optimisation campaign, given the same website and environment. At the same time, the expenses incurred on both these marketing methods were recorded and compared. Method: The active website of an existing, successful e-commerce concern was used as platform. The company had been using pay-per-click only for a period, whilst traffic was monitored. This system was decommissioned on a particular date and time, and an alternative search engine optimisation system was started at the same time. Again, both traffic and expenses were monitored.Results: The results indicate that the pay-per-click system did produce favourable results, but on the condition that a monthly fee has to be set aside to guarantee consistent traffic. The implementation of search engine optimisation required a relatively large investment at the outset, but it was once-off. After a drop in traffic owing to crawler visitation delays, the website traffic bypassed the average figure achieved during the pay-per-click period after a little over three months, whilst the expenditure crossed over after just six months. Conclusion: Whilst considering the specific parameters of this study, an investment in search engine optimisation rather than a pay-per-click campaign appears to produce better results at a lower cost, after a given period of time.[PDF to follow]
The growth of the World Wide Web has spawned a wide variety of new information sources, which has also left users with the daunting task of determining which sources are valid. Many users rely on the Web as an information source because of the low cost of information retrieval. It is also claimed that the Web has evolved into a powerful business tool. Examples include highly popular business services such as Amazon.com and Kalahari.net. It is estimated that around 80% of users utilize search engines to locate information on the Internet. This, by implication, places emphasis on the underlying importance of Web pages being listed on search engines indices. Empirical evidence that the placement of key words in certain areas of the body text will have an influence on the Web sites' visibility to search engines could not be found in the literature. The result of two experiments indicated that key words should be concentrated towards the top, and diluted towards the bottom of a Web page to increase visibility. However, care should be taken in terms of key word density, to prevent search engine algorithms from raising the spam alarm
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