Last week, Google announced that it would begin rolling out “Search, Plus Your World,” which is an integration of regular organic listings, PPC and social updates via Google Plus from your inner circles. For those people who thought social networking was going away any time soon, think again. This update is a bold statement by Google to say that social is here to stay; maybe more-so than ever.
The announcement of Google+, the newest addition to the social media world, is intriguing for multiple reasons and have people wondering if it may be the official answer to Facebook:
- Google Buzz was seemingly a failure and there was no way Google was going to make that mistake again
- The features and functionality look a lot like Facebook but with enhanced features such as video
- Given the fact that it was a lot like Facebook in terms of usage, it seems apparent that it will make a significant impact in SEO and could hurt Facebook overall
Those who are fighting for high organic rankings may be fighting a losing battle. Most generic keywords and semi long-tail keywords are sucked up and targeted by superior competition, most of them, also using pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, as part of their search engine marketing strategy.
The question, “Does paid advertising have a profound affect on organic search engine rankings?” comes up quite frequently in the search marketing world. The reality is, nobody has an exact answer except for the masterminds of the Google and Bing search algorithms.
By now you have already heard of paid advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC). It’s a way to advertise on the search engines and drive traffic to a specific landing page on your website with the click. What you may not know, is that PPC is substantially different that organic ranking in the search engines. Paid listings typically show up on the top or side-bar of the search results page when a specific string of text is input (shown below).
Organic rankings are a direct result of your on-page SEO efforts, link-building strategies and other SEM methods. Pay-per-click on the other hand, is a direct result of bidding for specific keywords.