Since pay per click passed the tipping point, many Irish companies these days are sitting up, taking notice and ploughing their advertising budgets into it.

And why not?? It’s a really cost-effective way of bringing targeted visitors to your website. And you don’t have to fiddle around with optimising your site to rank high on Google. No more messing with meta tags, page titles, link popularity, and suchlike. Just set up your campaign and site back.

This is an attitude that is all too prevalent, and there are a few reasons for it. For one, pay per click is a form of advertising, so it sits easier with agencies to sell it. And, as stated, pay per click is so much easier than search engine optimisation.

It’s great to have your name up there on the results page, but there is no substitute for high search engine rankings. The number one listing above will be seen by roughly 100% of people searching. The ad on the right-hand side, on the other hand, will be seen by about 50% of people.

The Eyetools diagram above is taken from a piece of software that tracks users eye movements on a Google results page. Red areas correspond to parts of the page that are viewed by almost everyone. Orange and yellow areas are popular parts of the page, and the blue areas are viewed less by users.

Findings such as this are forcing many companies back to the realisation that organic SEO is at least as important as pay per click. Even though it’s more difficult to get right, it needs to be an integral part of the marketing strategy.