Should You Use PPC To Help Launch Your New Site?

The TL,DR is: Yes. Unless you’re a brand that’s already huge and advertising in other ways. But even then it’s a good idea as it’ll help you work out the kinks in your site and give you some much needed traffic that organic won’t (yet).

Should you use a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign to help launch your first, new site? It’s a common question that we hear at Go Up. As a digital marketing agency, we especially hear it as a precursor to SEO. But with an increasingly competitive Search landscape and soaring click costs, should you be diving in right away?

Let’s look at the merits of PPC campaigns and the potential benefits for your first site.

When it comes to visibility on the web, Search is the largest single route to your site (combining paid and organic traffic). It’s second only to direct traffic; which can include branded organic search, such as when companies search for your brand name, or when users go direct to the your site URL.

An investigation from California marketing agency Brightedge showed that 51% of traffic comes from organic, with 10% from paid and only 5% from social.

We’ve seen similar results across many industries, but this also shows us an ideal world view of traffic. Organic search is the “best” kind of traffic because it’s free. However, with changing competition in search, especially the mobile search landscape, organic visibility is getting more difficult. How often do you see a search result that looks like this?

On mobile, tablet and desktop, more and more screen space it taken up by PPC Ads. This means that even if your brand new site can rank of the first page, it still might not get clicked because it’s several scrolls down the page. This is why many turn to PPC.

There are two main, but quite different, reasons to use PPC to aid the launch of your new site: competition and traffic.

Competition is a huge issue for many popular keywords, especially from transactional terms like restaurants, shops or services. Long established brands, ones with years of industry experience, old sites and huge marketing budgets, can often dominate the first page of search results. But new brands can pop themselves above the organic rankings by doing a little PPC and stealing some of their traffic.

Traffic is an important factor in how Search Engines rank your site. Time on site, number of pages viewed and interactions on the page are all good signs to Search Engines that your site is useful and accurate to the search result it was found in. With a brand new site, with no traffic, Google can’t use traffic to gauge the site’s usability. It may be able to use other search engine optimisation (SEO) factors, such as keywords, amount of content and links, to rank you, but it’ll be missing a key piece of data – your traffic

So, how can PPC help? Doing even a small PPC campaign will help your site to gain valuable traffic data. Not only will this be of benefit to search engines looking to rank your new site, but it’ll also help you to see which pages are the most popular, and if users are finding your site easy to navigate. This will help you to make improvements and ensure your site is successful.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns are one of the most dominant channels for advertising. It works for a range of larger and smaller budgets, and with a little, careful refinement, can yield impressive results. It’s a stable and relatively easy to understand source of clicks to your site, which is why so many businesses use it.

What’s great about a PPC campaign, when your new site is just starting out, is the additional long term SEO benefits. From a marketing perspective, appearing in those prime ad spots in search results will get your name out there. It makes you more visible. It works the same for SEO. The sooner you can begin to bring users to your site, the better your traffic, the more chance you’ll rank higher in search results. It’s cyclical. You might only initially see a few sales, but you’ll also be building a user base behind the keyboard, even if you don’t know it yet.

Once you do begin an SEO campaign, you’ll have a lot of useful insights into how your site is working and where it isn’t. You’ll also be able to learn from PPC which are the best keywords for users and which searches are the most competitive. All of this will make your SEO efforts more beneficial and efficient.

For more information on how to set up an PPC or SEO campaign: email [email protected] or call us on: 0207 871 7662