Here’s a million dollar question : Should you spend money on Pay-Per-Click search-result placement when you already have a high ranking in search engines for those keywords?

For the uninitiated, most (nearly every) search engine have a program where you can bid to show your advertisement when someone searches for specified keywords. You pay the amount you bid every time someone clicks on your ad.

Now back to the topic, if you already have a high ranking (organic placement) for certain keywords then is it worth it to have a pay-per-click ad for the same keywords?

My opinion : It depends!

Depends on what? Depends on how your brand is being projected for those keywords by the search engine and a few other things (more on that later).

Being projected what? Let us first drill down the basics of how search engines operate and how organic results are shown.

Every search engine is a software which reads the information out there on the web, analyses them and, each time you search for certain keywords, it matches your keywords to the analysed pages and displays to you the links to pages that it thinks would be best related to the keywords you are searching for.

How it analyses the relation of the page content to the keywords depends on the algorithm of the search engine. Each search engine has a unique, proprietary algorithm by which it associates the page content to the keywords. But that’s a different story we are not concerned with right now.

Every search engine does what is called content crawling. You may have heard that Google Bot or Yahoo! Slurp is crawling a site. Google Bot or Yahoo! Slurp? They are called spiders.

If you are allergic to spiders, don’t worry about these one. Search engine spiders are nothing more than a piece of code which try to automatically access websites, read their content and create a cache of the content. This cached content is further analysed by the search engine algorithm.

While the search engine algorithm is analysing your content, it competes the pages on your site with the pages it crawled from other sites for each keyword that they think your web page might be associated with. After they have done this analysis they assign a rank to your web page for that keyword.

Now this is the point I’ve been waiting to make : While doing this ranking, the search engine also tries to ‘automatically’ pick up the lines of content from your web page which it thinks would best describe the relation of your page to the keyword best. They keyword here is tries to.

Since search engines are not tweaked by humans (while there are rumors that humans indeed interfere with the rankings for highly searched keywords to provide the end user with higher quality results but nothing has been confirmed by any search engine), the software might pick that content as description which does not describe your web page the way you might want it described.

Here’s Reason #1 why you should care about PPC: Spreading the right message.

You have absolutely no control over how the search engine describes your content in the organic results and neither you can do anything to get it changed (you can actually do some search engine optimization to try and change your description but it is a hit-or-miss thing and it can take months for your description to change, if it does at all).

But that is not the case with Pay-Per-Click placement.You have total control over the message being spread: You can set the headlines, you set the description of the content and you can geo-target different messages to different regions.

If you already have the description that you are satisfied with, no need to worry further. However, if you think that search engine is not spreading your key message, you might want to look into PPC.

Reason #2: Search Engine might not be linking to the page you want to get linked for that keyword.

You have virtually no control over which page of yours will be ranked higher for a keyword. You might want to lead the visitors to a different landing page but the search engine might be ranking a different page or even your homepage higher.

However, with pay-per-click placement you can control which landing page your visitors see. You can split-test your pages and find out which offer / placement works best at converting visitors without worrying about the affect it might have on your search engine ranking.

Now that’s another extremely compelling reason to look into PPC advertising even when you have the ranking in the organic results.

Reason #3: Search Engines take time to rank pages (and hence your message / special offers).

Most of the times, Search Engines take some time to rank your pages. And, if you are competing for a high-value keyword then you have some serious-seo work laid out for you.

Now, what if you want your special offers and deals to show up for the keywords? That’s where PPC Comes in.

When you have a paid placement, you can have your ads reflect your latest offers or some other special message (Wanted to advertise the fact that you were offering free ‘on-time’ shipping even during the NYC Transit strike but search engines were not showing it? No probs, just buy PPC Ads) without having to wait for the search engine to crawl and rank your web page with that message.

Reason #4: Multiple Exposures = More Attention.

It has been proven over and over again, the more the target is exposed to your message, the most likely he or she is to check your offer. With PPC Advertising you can have your message shown multiple times on the same page where you also have a high placement. This means more attention to your message from the searcher and hence more response for your campaign.

Conclusion : While we have laid out some really compelling reasons to use pay-per-click programs even when you have a high organic ranking in the search engines but the truth is that it will absolutely depend on your marketing plan.

We insist that you study the 4 reasons we have laid out above and see if they fit your marketing plan and requirement. If you answer yes to any of the reasons, we suggest you that you at least try out Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing programs.

Certain keywords will cost you as low as 5 cent a click which greatly diminishes the risk involved in a trial campaign. If it produces desirable results for you, continue with the campaign otherwise ditch it.