High in the Rankings

Others say it pays to closely monitor the kind of return you get from pay-per-click spending. “People can run into problems when they are paying one or two dollars per click and they’re selling $15 products,” Bierbaum says.

Larson suggests that companies employ both natural and paid strategies out of the gate, then consider phasing out pay-per-click spending as natural optimization techniques begin to produce better results.

In general, Odden recommends allocating about 30 percent of pay-per-click dollars toward broad or generic key words and 70 percent toward more unique or targeted words. General terms tend to attract more tire kickers; narrow terms bring in people further along in the purchasing cycle, who often are more motivated buyers. “The more unique the phrase, usually the better the conversion rate,” he says.

For example, a printing company spent a considerable amount of pay-per-click money on the keyword “postcards” before discovering that the terms “postcard printing” and even “double-sided postcard printing” had better ROI. The visitors who searched with those phrases were more likely to become buyers.

Most companies will continue to use pay-per-click as a complement to, not substitute for, natural optimization to increase their Web site visibility. And where such organic efforts are concerned, focusing on the basics will continue to serve them well.

“What has worked from day one in search-engine optimization still works today, and that is making sure you have good, frequently updated content on your site, the proper keyword strategy, and an abundant number of quality incoming links,” Odden says.