Here’s the ugly truth: if you want to be uber successful at SEO then you’re going to need PPC (Pay Per Click).
It’s a dilemma no doubt.
Which Camp Are You In?
As marketers, we’re generally in one camp or the other. If you’ve read my previous posts then you already know what I personally favour: SEO.
I tried PPC several years ago and I lost out on my first campaign. To me, PPC feels like gambling. It’s like putting money into a slot machine and hoping that you get 3 matching combinations.
How many coins did you put into that machine when you were a kid at the fairground before you got lucky?
With that said, PPC has its place. And it does work – but only if you’re smart about it.
And that doesn’t mean running to the big G and asking them to optimise your campaigns for you.
Do that and you’ll get burned.
Think about it… what separates your competitors from you? And we’re not just talking ad budget here.
How To Get Smart Like Your Competitors
If AdWords didn’t work, your competitors would quickly run out of cash.
The reason why your competitors, the ones who are running AdWords, are able to get it to work is because they’ve figured out their system.
If it costs £10 a click and it takes an average of 10 clicks to get a paying client, they know that for every £100 of investment into AdWords, they’re getting a return of ‘x’ amount. That ‘x’ amount is the return on the product or the service that they sell.
But what if you still have a hesitancy to throw caution to the wind and you just can’t get over that aching feeling in the pit of your stomach – the ones that tells you that PPC still feels like gambling?
The Solution To Getting PPC To Work
Well here’s the solution:
You set a daily ad budget: something that you’re comfortable with, e.g. £10 a day.
And you put in multiple keywords into your campaign. Have several ads running in your campaign but only target 1 keyword per ad.
Doing it this way will let you quickly figure out which keywords are getting the clicks because it’ll be those keywords that drain your budget the quickest.
The next step is figuring out which keywords actually convert.
See, it’s not enough to just figure which keywords get the clicks. You need to focus in on the keywords that actually convert and the chances are that it’s the longer tail, cheaper keywords that convert.
If you target a short tail keyword, like the ones that all your competitors are going for, you’ll end up paying more for the click and you’ll attract more ‘window shoppers’ – i.e. people that are surfing for information with no real intent to buy.
The Right Way To Use PPC For SEO campaigns
1. Check in the Google Keyword Planner for related keyword ideas that Google suggests and also for the keywords that your competition are using for their websites.
2. Set up a small campaign for PPC AdWords.
3. Get enough data at the end of a week (or 2 if your budget can stretch that far) to figure out which keywords are getting the clicks and which keywords are converting.
4. Ramp up the daily budget for the keywords that are converting.
5. Create an SEO campaign for the keywords that are converting.
If you follow these 5 steps above, you could save yourself months of potentially wasted effort with an SEO campaign.
After all, it’s no fun targeting a keyword that, once you’re ranked for, doesn’t pull in the traffic that you’re expecting based on the search volume that Google’s Keyword Planner tells you.
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