John Gagnon, the speaker of the video, has lots of good information regarding paid advertising, but if there is one thing I got out of his video, while it may be beneficial to pay for ads to have your site seen more, it is not necessary to pay for ads to “beat” your competition.
Fairly early on in the video, Gagnon states that 75% of users don’t scroll past the first page of search results. When you think about it, however, that doesn’t seem too crazy. Think of your own personal search habits. For me, I tend to skip advertisements and only check the links directly below them on the first page.
In class, we have been learning all about the benefits of keywords, key phrases, meta descriptions, etc and how these alone can help get your website to appear on the first page of a search result. So think of it this way. If you are a consumer and you tend to not pay attention to the advertisements at the top of a page, you’re going straight to the links that depend on keywords, key phrases, and the meta description.
Overall, if you are a company that can afford to pay large prices to have an advertisement placed at the top of a search page on google, then do it. No harm done. But for a smaller business or independent website owner, this is not a make or break situation. Focus on all of the smaller components you can fine-tune to get your website higher up on a page of search results. Find your niche, create content worth reading and viewing, and the interactions will come.