Pay Per Click - needn't be a bottomless pit

"Pay Per Click" is the form of internet advertising in which a company opts to pay for an advertisement, which is then presented via the Search Engine Search results or via peoples' own websites. If someone happens to 'click' on the advertisement, a charge is incurred by the advertiser and the 'clicker' is carried through to the website of the advertiser (hopefully to then purchase something).

Pay Per Click (or PPC) is therefore also known as sponsored search. i.e. it is a funded "push" by the advertiser to get noticed, as opposed to an organic (free) "pull" by the search engines to display company information in the search results. Google offers this service via "Adwords"; other service providers are Yahoo; Miva; 7 search; Epilot; Looksmart, MSN and others.

Advantages of PPC? Advantage 1. It can promote a website to public view far faster and much wider than reliance on 'organic' search engine optimisation. Equally, the effectiveness of the advertising campaign - unlike in the physical world - is traceable to the 'click' - so there is a whole load of information an advertiser can glean very very quickly about the effectiveness of their campaign. (I have also used PPC as 'market research' for keywords to be used in my organic search engine optimisation - because you can see very quickly which phrases are being displayed and clicked-on and which are not. Even though I don't then continue with the actual PPC campaign itself.)

Advantage 2? There is a lot less mystique around "how to rank in the search results" around PPC than there is around organic Search optimisation. And whilst undoubtedly you can still fail utterly and spend hugely with a poorly optimised PPC campaign, the advantages in '1' above still generally obtain. If you pay, you will be displayed.


Disadvantages of PPC? Really stem from its advantages! On the surface it seems any altruism displayed by search engines in providing 'free' SEO utilities for organic search results go out of the window when it comes to PPC. Indeed if you click and drag your cursor over a Google search results page, it highlights the PPC results first, the organic search results second, demonstrating how Google itself prioritises its website construction and popularity rankings within its own pages! So - yes - with PPC, you, er, pay for it. The more competition there is in a particular market, yes, the more you pay to make your ad competitive (i.e. display higher up the rankings). No kidding, Search Optimisation keywords themselves (as an example close to my heart) in big urban areas can cost as much as $30 a click!!!! You can see how PPC can indeed be a bottomless pit. This has led to a conspiracy theory amongst SEOs that Search Engine companies keep their rules about organic search optimisation deliberately obscure and ever-changing, exactly BECAUSE they want you to take out expensive PPC campaigns.

Which leads me to the point of this post, and why I have titled it as I have. (Is PPC a bottom-less pit?) Because actually "for the little guy", the PPC market superficially is, exactly that. (A yawning chasm into which they throw lots of money, without ever seeing where it goes or what comes out of it). PPC is therefore (on the surface) a reasonably 'unfair' and exclusive preserve of big companies and deep pockets. This runs contrary to proclamations by search engine companies of how they level the playing field and champion the little guys.


This is where, of course, I provide a synthesis of exactly how "little guys" can do well, piercing through the mumbo jumbo, conspiracy theories etc, right? Right! For a clue, look back to my post titled "maintain, deepen and niche".

You see, PPC (as indeed SEO itself) can be viewed as a bottomless pit for large companies selling "one-ize fits all" commodity products. Their organic SEO also has to optimise the words everybody else uses on 11 million other pages across the web. Because if you are going to pursue commodity products, you have to sell to a commodity market. So at this level, I think actually the search engines are pretty ALTRUISTIC in their sneaky hidden algorithms and expensive PPC bid mechanisms. They work absolutely against the big companies playing to a wide field. (The rules and tools keep you guessing and keep you paying).

But little companies should not be trying to compete on this playing field. If small companies (I provide Search Engine Optimisation Services for small European Businesses in the Limousin, Poitou Charentes and Aquitaine regions of South West France) pursue "Maintain, Deepen, and Niche" strategies, my experience is:

a) I can land them on Google Page 1 using "deepend and niche" type terms just through organic search results and I have a pretty good results record behind that (otherwise bold) statement;

b) Their use of PPC has to be very targeted and specific.

Both PPC and SEO are mass market disciplines supported by mass-market tools.
Small companies generally fail to make headway with either because (if they do SEO at all) they equally bring a mass market mentality to their activities: they try to rank on Google using really generic terms; and equally conduct PPC campaigns (if at all) with the same mindset.


So I think there is neither an SEO conspiracy going-on against the little guy, nor do I think PPC is a bottomless pit. It is just that in most cases, the literature and body-of-knowledge has been created for the big companies tossing huge sums after very generic search terms. And small companies themselves lack the knowledge and skills-base to conduct adequate marketing (which at the end of the day is what underlies good SEO).

Briquesetclics exists exactly to offer Search Optimisation services to small European businesses in Southwest France: specifically the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine.

"Maintain, deepen and niche"

European small businesses do not have a hope of competing in the mass market with big players. This is almost wholly due to supply-side constraints: they cannot afford the marketing and generate the brand presence; they cannot commoditise their products enough to compete on cost; they do not possess the capacity to fulfill mass demand or service mass after-sales.

I said this is a supply-side constraint. Because this is the playing field that big players play on. But is it currently also their undoing. I say "currently". Actually, arguably, the seeds of the current recession go back at least to 1997 when it became evident that mass production, across almost every market, was over-supplying the market with un-differentiated goods. Think about it: Banking, electronic goods, even holidays: walk down the high street even in 1997 and every single offering in every single shop was exactly the same (or as near as no difference) to any other. The only possible distinction came down to price. Every major player could supply the demand of the entire market on its own. The only means of competing was through continued operational cut-backs and adoption of technology and operational efficiency. There was absolutely no - or nearly no - competition between actual products any more. This is why we saw the flurry of mergers in the late 1990s and why things nearly came undone in the dot-com burst in 2002. The economy required further concentration of mass producers (i.e. merger) to concentrate productive capacity in fewer players. It is what is also desperately needed now - although politically unacceptable because of the jobs implications. (Which made less of a noise, of course during the good times!).

The flip side is that companies darn well need to start focussing on demand - and this is where small businesses are at no disadvantage. Let the big players focus on concentration and further operational efficiency. Small players need to be moving like billio to grab customers and that's why I title this post "Maintain, deepen and niche". Have you seen that dreadful Thompson holiday advert currently doing the rounds? Where it looks like they'll put you in a studio: bring in the sand, fabricate a pretty view; "massage-away" any black clouds and turn on UV lamps to give you a fake tan? I mean, this expresses the "mass-commoditisation-ultimate-eccentricity" that big companies now face. There is no distinction any more.

For European small businesses to stay competitive: "Maintain, deepen and niche":

- Maintain - seems clear enough - but you need to be working like stink to keep your existing customers. Do this and do this step first.

"Maintain" DOES NOT mean "keep doing exactly what you do". It means going all out to improve what you already give existing customers. If you can't improve your product, at least give it a facelift. What about a total makeover of the tired website that is sitting gathering dust in cyberspace (and never brought you much traffic in the first place). If you can't actually upgrade your product, delight existing customers and improve your chances of hooking new ones by taking positive and cheap steps to "Maintain" your existing pipeline. If you have a shop: paint it.

"Deepen" means "ADD" stuff to what you offer. That means offering more to existing customers than you already give them (i.e. "deepen" their relationship with you) or add "more" to your proposition to attract new customers. Do "more" to attract new customers. Have you considered optimising that now re-vamped website to become more competitive in search terms. European business! Are you actually selling in more than one language? (Small aside: but doing this saved our holiday business' bacon in the last 18 months. And it seems so obvious.). Deepen your market.

!"Niche" means work out what it is you do that everyone else doesn't and sell to that. Look: small businesses can't afford the marketing budget that big ones can, but there are loads of free tools on the web you can use (or Briquesetclics.fr can help you use). Simple example: do a search on Google for what you think you offer: Say "Gites". Oh dear: 11 million pages return this. :-(
So try "Gites in France". Better. Only 4 million pages return this. But apply "Niche" to your thinking and you realise that there are fishing lakes within 5 Km of your "Gite". Only 418,000 pages return "Fishing in France". Mmm interesting. So now search for "Fishing in France accommodation" and you're down to 300,000 and actually starting to get competitive. With a 10 page website offering a good mix of "niche" phrases like this and properly optimised - you're actually very likely to possess search terms that will get you onto Google page 1 if not page 2.

Briquesetclics.fr enshrines "Maintain, deepen and Niche" in its Internet offerings to European small businesses. You can compete in this tough time, but you must not compete on the same playing field as the big players. Their pitch is presently water-logged

The choke point for European small businesses has arrived

· Costly over-reliance on physical economic and transportation networks. Only 15% of Europe’s transactions are completed on line;

· High wages. In response to high domestic costs, manufacturing and service activities are being outsourced to Asia because it is cheaper to perform these tasks there, putting pressure on competitiveness, costs and wages in domestic markets;

· Tight credit. The world is presently in a recession witnessing a permanent structural change to the way we’ll get credit. The cost of loans is going to become higher: property prices will level off or fall – certainly in the short term – and businesses will come under extreme pressure to remain profitable – all putting pressure on cost and competitiveness in physical markets and peoples’ wages;

· Europe is a market of Multiple languages. Yet most small and medium-sized enterprises are single-language and therefore totally dependent on their domestic markets. Most SMEs cannot afford to participate in a multi-language environment and are therefore constrained to their domestic market;


It forms a vicious circle binding SMEs to their local domestic markets. To break this we need to bust open the ability to trade in multiple languages and the technology to make this cost-effective! Leveraging Electronic Business in multiple languages is no longer an option.