Often, sites view seo and PPC marketing as exclusive
marketing techniques. Each marketing method has its
advocates. In reality, both have a place in the Internet
marketing process. If you intend to pursue a major seo
effort, a PPC campaign is a critical early step.
PPC For Testing
Let s say you have a site offering a service or product in
the travel market. You have put together a healthy budget
and decided to go for broke. Yep, you re optimizing and
trading links in an effort to go after keyword phrases with
major traffic and competition. For instance, you have decided
to have a go at Europe travel , which has roughly 400,000
searches each month and major competition for high rankings.
You spend two years trading links, adding content and so on.
Miracle of miracles, you pop on to the first page of search
results. You start shopping for your private jet only to
realize a very disturbing thing. You are getting thousands
of visits, but few sales. After running calculations, you
find the site is converting at 1 in 10,000.
Houston, we have a problem.
A PPC campaign should be used to test your site against
keyword phrases before you spend the time and money on an
seo campaign. The best platforms to use for your campaign
are Google Adwords and Overture. Yes, click fraud is a
problem, but less so on these platforms.
After opening accounts and laying a credit card down at the
PPC alter, you need to give some thought at to how you will
test your keywords. Here s a hint. The campaign should be
designed to test the keyword phrases, not maximize sales.
This may sound like a strange statement, but keep in mind
the purpose of the campaign. You are determining whether you
have picked appropriate keyword phrases for the seo
campaign. So, how does it all go wrong?
With both Overture and Adwords, you have the ability to
designate the reach of your keyword phrases. Most pick the
broad match option, which is terrible for testing. With
broad match, your advertisements are going to appear for
your keyword phrase AND variations of the phrase. Since the
ad is appearing on a variety of keyword phrases, the results
can give you a false impression of the value of the primary
keyword phrase.
Going back to our example, we start a Google Adwords
campaign for Europe travel and use the default broad match
option. After a month, we are happy to find the ads
converting at 1 in 70. Having validated the keyword phrase,
we set off on the long seo campaign. But are we really sure
about the validity of the keyword phrase. Since Google has
been known to seriously expand keyword phrases under the
broad match option, how do we know that the true keyword
phrase isn't European travel ? We don t unless we take a few
additional steps.
The first step is to limit the PPC advertisements by
bypassing the broad match option. Instead, you want to limit
the appearance of the ad only to searches for the exact
keyword phrase. In Adwords, this is known as the exact
phrase match. To designate it, you simply place brackets []
around the keyword phrase. Second, you need to track traffic
originating from the ads. This can be done using tracking
tools on your server or through the tracking options offered
by each PPC platform. Regardless of your choice, the
resulting data will give a much truer picture of the value
of the particular keyword phrases.
Nothing is more aggravating then getting top rankings, but
miserable conversions. The only way to beat this problem is
to test, test, test. Using PPC campaigns at the outset of an
Internet marketing efforts can save you a lot of headaches
later on. |
