Kranz On Copy: Insights and answers on copywriting and writing copy

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a woman who markets white boards to academic institutions. She was reflecting on the performance of her pay-per-click SEO campaigns. Very expensive. But also worse than expensive -- conversions were dismally low; the paid placements were pulling in lots of poor, unqualified prospects. In other words, junk.

Those selling pay-for-clicks boast that at least 50% of all web activity that comes to your site begins with a search engine query. That may be true. But what about the other fifty percent? And more to the point, those halves aren't equal: the quality of prospects who type in your URL (or visit through a saved bookmark) or follow a link from a trustworthy site is MUCH GREATER than that of visitors who typed in a few keywords in a hit-or-miss pursuit that may not have anything to do with what you offer.

That's why organic SEO -- optimization that leverages the quality of your content, your inbound links, and the content you distribute elsewhere on the Internet -- is so important. The overall yield of clicks might be lower. But their value-- their likelihood of drawing a qualified lead -- is so much higher.

After all, you don't want to pay big dollars to have a fresh pile of junk dropped at your door. You want the good stuff? Develop meaningful content and spread it around...