The fable of the hare and tortoise is known by most people, but it has parallels in the world of the Internet, specifically in the area of Search Engine Marketing.



Search Engine Marketing covers all the ways by which a website can be made more visible in the listings provided by the engines in response to a request for pages relating to a search phrase. This of course covers the areas on "Pay Per Click" (PPC) and that of "Organic" or "Merit" listings, the latter of course being free.

It is PPC that makes Google almost all of its money, and is an area used by many website owners to ensure that their site is visible and gains that all important traffic.

But what has this got to do with tortoises and hares??

The relationship is quite simple really, in that PPC is very much a "hare" (gets a website on the front page very fast) while Organic listings can take a long time, and are thus very "tortoise like".

In this little story we can take the analogy even further, but first, let us make the rules for the race. In the original fable, it was just a straight run to a finishing post, but in the world of Search Engine Marketing it is slightly different, the race not being one to get a website's listing on the front page of Google (such a race will always be won by the PPC hare), but instead to the chequered flag that marks a successful Return on Investment....

Why is this the case you ask, quite simply because being first on PPC is not always the answer, as you will see as the story unfolds.

To the Race !!

Picture if you can the starting line, there is the hare with a sack load of money that he intends to pay to anyone who will visit the site while on the run to the finishing post, whilst the poor old tortoise has got his soap box out, knowing that he will have to do a lot of talking to people, asking them to support his site (by links).

Worse still, the tortoise cannot even take the shortest path to the finishing line, as he will have to go out of his way to visit as many other sites as possible in his quest for support. To make matters even worse, he knows that even when he does get "support", it will take the umpires (the Search Engines) quite a time before they will "notice" and thus make his climb to the front page of the listings and his goal of getting a good ROI on his labours even more difficult and long...

It is no surprise therefore that when the hare streaks off, the visits to the site pour in just as fast as he can throw the money out, but wait, is this really the idea, surely you have to make sure that the right person is visiting? Asking these questions (in the SEM world this equates to choosing the right key phrases) slows the hare down quite a bit, but he is not worried as he knows that the tortoise is going to have the same problem, so off he goes.

The tortoise's journey is much slower, he has to take a longer path and do a lot of work to get people to notice him and his requests for support, he even has to make sure that the words he uses (in the SEM world this equates to those on the web page) are used in the right way, as otherwise he knows that the umpires will disallow his gains.

Thus it takes a long time before the pages that the tortoise is working on get onto the front page of Google. The hare has of course had his pages listed on the front page ever since the race started, but he has gone through a lot of money buying in those visits and it took longer to get to the end than he thought it would too.

So who won?

Unlike the fable, in the SEM world, the winner is not so certain, you see, PPC can work very well indeed (when managed properly and the "right" words chosen, something that can take quite a while to sort out). But however successful the PPC campaign is, it will in 99% of cases not be as good at converting visitors to buyers as a well constructed Organic campaign, so while you may get lots of visits you may well end up like the hare, a bit short of cash.

The morale of the story?

By all means, do use the "hare" approach, but be aware of the dangers of PPC, always remembering that those that click on PPC ads seem not, it seems, to be so committed to purchase or enquire as those who click on the Organic listings. So go for PPC by all means, but don't please don't forget the tortoise, after all he won in the original fable...