It took less than two decades to transform the way we search for information on the web, from Yahoo’s directory listings and rudimentary spiders, to the meteoric rise of Google’s sheer domination of search, creating entirely new industries in the process, and the economy of the “keyword”.
The premise is pretty simple; ranking in the Top 10 Google search results brings higher traffic to your site, and if you are willing to pay, they’ll show your links at the top of the page. Everyone else will pile up underneath you in the listings. The age of SEO and PPC is upon us, which in turn has generated thousands of new agencies and career specialists, and enormous profits for pioneers like Google.
The question that many people are asking, is do we really have to pay Google for the privilege of having our site found on the web today? And it’s no longer just Alphabet, as Facebook and other companies figure out how to monetize online ad spend, with ever differentiating formats and expanding options for segmentation, where does a company even begin to advertise online these days?
The tale of the Pied Piper comes to mind, and it’s fair to assume that a lot of companies feel extorted when having to place a lot of ad spend on what seems to be very hit-and-miss Pay Per Click advertising in the face of waning results from their previous Search Engine Optimization efforts. Organic search results used to be the holy grail of SEO only a few years ago, only to flounder on rocky shores of Search Engine Results Pages which are now dominated by space reserved for paid ads.
The answer would seem to lie in what I term the “Keyword Economy”, where we appreciate that the net effect of online ad spend has been to tie monetary value to words and phrases. New marketplaces opened up for the auction, lease and purchase of the keywords most in demand. This new economy also pressures us to be more efficient and resourceful in our use of language as marketers and advertisers; words count more now than ever before.
To deliver value to our clients in this new age of monetized keywords, we have to be able to distinguish when best to pay the piper for critical traffic for our digital marketing efforts, and when to build out our long tail keyword approach to building rich content that will still garner organic traffic over time. It’s a dual strategy of using both SEO and PPC in a blended approach to create that value for our clients, and to ensure that when we do pay the piper, we are focused on getting the best possible search results.
The views expressed herein are personal and do not reflect the views of any of my clients or employers.