Use Adwords and PPC to Boost Your SEO Results
We want to step back a little bit today and talk about a very different subject that most will probably not think is related to Article Submission or SEO – PPC (pay-per-click) or Google Adwords. Most SEO entrepreneurs and DIY’ers (hey, that’s what we are ) overlook this step of SEO, that, while it requires an upfront investment, may in fact, save you quite a bit of money in the long run.
The first principal that is very important is that you must have the right SEO mindset. You must understand that SEO is a long term advertising “investment” in your business. It is not a do it once and forget it solution. Just like advertising in the yellow pages. You don’t run a yellow pages ad for a week – you run it for months, or years – it’s an “on-going” investment in your business’ advertising. SEO, article marketing and article submission should all be thought of the exact same way – a long-term business advertising investment. Okay, off the pulpit now and onto the meat…
Pay Per Click is something that many people are scared of because of the horror stories with the costs associated with it. And to some extent, you are justified in being cautious with Adwords. A couple of years ago it wasn’t such a big deal. Just about anyone could throw up a campaign and have mild to good success. The technical aspects haven’t changed much, but the difference is that today clicks are a lot more expensive than they used to be. So throwing up a quick campaign is still pretty easy to do, however, it may not be very fiscally sound to do so. Many, many tools have come out in the past year to 18 months that do some pretty amazing stuff with Adwords campaigns and they are all geared towards minimizing the costs so that you can get a more profitable campaign setup. That is becoming more and more of a challenge for the average person to do nowadays and you almost have to have specialty software and tools in order to manage profitable campaigns. Personally we use statsjunky to monitor our PPC campaigns and couldn’t make do without it. But this post is not about setting up a profitable Adwords campaign – to the contrary – we’re not even concerned with profitability with this approach. Okay, that got your attention… so let me explain…
One of the great benefits of Adwords is that you get near realtime feedback. You know right away whether you’re getting impressions, clicks, whether you’ve got a good keyword or not – it’s almost instantaneous. Search Engine Optimization, on the other hand, is virtually the opposite. You can take sixty or ninety days of sustained effort to get a keyword onto page #1 or top 5 or whatever, only to find out that it’s a non-converting keyword (ask me how we know – LOL, we’ve done it guys). So what I’m suggesting here is not that you try to create some long term PPC campaign – that is a separate topic altogether. What I am suggesting is that you use the right tool for the job. If you’re trying to figure out what keywords to chase, you’re probably well advised to spend $100 or $200 on an Adwords campaign just for “research”. The purpose of this campaign will be just to find out which keywords are “buy” keywords.
So, the strategy would be to keep the ad text the same for all of the keywords and throw a bunch of different keywords in the campaign that are individually tracked through your buy page via Google Analytics conversion tracking (or a third party tool). You must be doing keyword level tracking for this exercise to be of any value to you. Remember the goal here is to “learn” which keywords convert to sales and which don’t. You may be very surprised at the results and it may dramatically affect your SEO approach for the site. In fact, upon examining the results, you may completely change strategies or even abandon the project altogether. And while you might think that you’ve just wasted $100 or $200, in reality you may have saved yourself months worth of work and expenses.
This approach is not recommended for everyone. If you don’t have some decent experience with Adwords, you might be better served to contract with an SEO service provider to run a short campaign for you. Keep in mind, most SEO companies really don’t like this – they charge setup fees to avoid one-time campaigns like this. So you’ll have to shop around a bit. But, Adwords is not for the faint of heart. The benefits, however, can be well worth it. By narrowing down your keywords to a select group of “converting” keywords, you will dramatically reduce your SEO costs and the time it takes to get your SEO monthly budget “in the black”. You will be armed with the information of which keywords to invest in and which to run from – that is almost like being able to see the future. Now you just have to get the rankings you need with sustained and consistent SEO and article submission effort.
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On August 2, 2010 Marcus J. wrote:
Hi Troy, so this is what you’ve been telling me about when you say that I could “test out” my keywords using a PPC campaign. I never really thought about it this way and I agree it saves a lot of time!
On August 6, 2010 Gerund wrote:
I think that rank tracking just makes the importance of setting up metrics much more urgent. For one, you would need to know what keywords are giving you visitors, and it would tell you just how many visitors you have at particular ranks.