PPC Advertising – The First Step In A SEO Marketing
Campaign
By
Halstatt
Pires
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’ve 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’ve 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.
Halstatt
Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com
- a San Diego Internet marketing and advertising company.
Article
Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
