strategies - pay for branding or stay natural?

[polarcherry]

Apologies if this is in the incorrect forum. (i'm new here!)

We are just about to re launch our new company site (b2b)

There's two questions really here -

1 - do you bid on your company name if naturally ranked #1?

2 -I don't know whether to let it run and see where the search engines rank it organically first or go straight into cpc ad's for the important b2b keywords.

We're divided on this strategy at work.

Any pro's / con's would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

[BasicECommerce]

Welcome to the forum.

1 - It is a good idea to bid on your company name. The main reason is to make sure you bid on the misspellings or different ways to call yourself. This way, if someone is searching for you but not using the name correctly, you can still show.
Second, conversions for these are cheap and tracked. You can create reports to see how strong your brand is. This can provide a leg up when dealing with clients.

2 - If it were me, I would delve into SEM. By waiting, you are leaving potential clients in the dark to be picked up by someone else. You can always decrease your spend as your site climbs up the organic listings to a more prominent position.

Hope this helps.

-BEC

[jimbeetle]

And there have been quite a few studies that show good organic rankings plus SE PPC reinforce each other.

[MarkKennedySEM]

My first post (Yea!)...

I agree with the above posters and want to add one more reason to go with PPC as well.

I have a client whose business name is the same as a very popular song. So when someone types in their company name (without the .com or with spaces), the top listings are dominated by sites about the song.

The fix was to create a PPC adgroup with their compnay name as the keyword. If you run into this type of situation, PPC can help. The CPC is cheap and no one else is bidding on the keyword.

-Mark