Starting, maintaining, or re-designing a website is more difficult than a lot of people might imagine. You’re stuck wondering if you should optimize your website for search engines right out of the gate or incorporate pay-per-click advertising. It’s recommended that you implement quality content with Google authorship while also taking advantage of schema.org markup and webmaster tools. Having an effective plan for your website right out of the gate will eliminate any surprises in the future. There’s no right answer to this question because every website is different; however, using PPC before SEO is akin to putting the cart before the horse.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Pros and Cons

While PPC is an effective way of getting the word out about your business, it’s far from perfect. At the start of any PPC campaign, you will notice that you get results right away. These results aren’t necessarily a guarantee of conversions though. You must have a website with great user experience that will either make people want to come back for more or designed for conversions. If they get to your website and notice it’s inconsistent with your advertising, you will have a hard time convincing those visitors to return in the future. Plus, you will get charged every time someone clicks on your website, which shortens the room for error even further.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pros and Cons

Due to the numerous updates search engines are making to their algorithms, search engine optimization or SEO is a moving target. You have to ensure that the information you’re basing your SEO techniques off of is the most current version. It’s important that you stick with white-hat (or ethical) SEO techniques rather than trying to go for the black-hat (or unethical) methods. Staying in the good graces of all search engines, especially Google, is important if you want your website to remain a long-term fixture in your industry. Most website owners make the biggest mistake of hiring the cheapest SEO company and or freelancer and hoping the best. What they don’t know is for $300 they are getting 3-6 hours of link blasting which can hurt your website and or do nothing at all.

Research is Key

Before you even think about starting a website and or a campaign, you should perform research to guarantee that there’s a need for what you’re putting out there. Sometimes you might have a good idea brewing, but it falls into a category that has a lot of competition. If your website offers something that similar websites don’t, that’s a reason to start a website amongst a lot of competition. You have to have realistic expectations though. Your website will sit low in the rankings and progress slowly as it gets older rather than enjoying the meteoric rise that low competition websites experience.

Running PPC First

When you run a PPC campaign right out of the gate, everything you need to know about your website will be laid out in front of you. Analytics are you key. TEST, TEST, TEST! You will be able to tell what you’re doing wrong and where you need to improve. You can also figure out what’s working, so you can begin to highlight which areas you want to focus on going forward. You would be surprised at how honest potential visitors can be when they see a website that’s not living up to its potential. Finally, analytics on the keywords that are converting best for you can now be used to decide on words you want to rank organically for through SEO.

Giving It Your Best Shot

There’s nothing mystical about running a website. All of the things that you need to do in the process before, after, and during your website’s launch might seem intimidating; however, everything has a way of coming together once you get started. With a great idea or business in hand, you should have no problem figuring out how to proceed every step of the way. Avoid getting so lost in the planning stages that you trap yourself. Put yourself out there and then build upon what you started in the weeks and months to come. Do the appropriate research or hire the right people to do it for you, but make sure you do it right the first time around.