Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category
Creating A PPC Campaign To Improve SEO
Wednesday, April 20th, 2011Before you spend a lot of time and money on your search engine optimization efforts, you should consider marketing your website with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising?
Why?
Well, there are a number of benefits including:
- It will allow you to get a more accurate picture as to how much search volume there is for the keyword phrases you are targeting. Although most keyword tools will report search volume data, you’ll frequently find conflicting information.
- If you track your conversions, you can quickly see which keyword phrases yield the highest return on your advertising dollar. These “money” terms can then be used when performing SEO to your site.
- If you haven’t already created a PPC campaign it’s possible that you will be offered a certain amount of free advertising credits by the search engine of your choice. Google frequently gives out $100 worth of advertising credits to those who create an Adwords account so you might as well take advantage of it.
In addition to the benefits listed above, it will also allow you to get quick exposure for competitive keyword phrases. Instead of waiting for weeks, or months, you can show your ads the same day you place them.
How to Set a Budget for Your PPC Campaign
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
If you are considering PPC to advertise your business online setting a sufficient budget is very important to make sure your campaign will be a success. Nothing is worse than spending hours of your valuable time researching keywords, setting up a campaign and writing ads, just to find out the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) for your keywords are so high that you can barely get any clicks for your monthly budget.
The first step to any PPC campaign is to determine a maximum budge you are comfortable spending on a monthly basis for your campaign. The next step is to find out what you can get for this budget and if it is worth looking into PPC or if the money would be better spent on other marketing activities such as SEO or email marketing.
The main factor for your budget is the CPC for the keywords you would like your ads to show up for.Based on the average CPC for these keywords you can estimate how many clicks you can expect from your monthly budget.
To find out about the CPC of a keyword you can either use keyword research tools, such as the free Google keyword tool, which provide you with estimates or you can use PPC itself to run a quick test campaign for CPC numbers. Let’s look at both options.
1. CPC estimates from Google keyword tool
Go to the following URL to access the Google keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
To get CPC estimates for your market from the Google keyword tool type in your targeted keywords and press search.
Then click on “Columns”, check “Estimated Avg. CPC” and click “Save” (see screenshot below).
Now you will see the Estimated Avg. CPC on the right side of each keyword.
If you only want numbers for keyword phrases that contain your exact keyword make sure to check “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”.
You can now play around with this tool and see what the CPC is in your market and which keywords are the most expensive.
This method can give you a good understanding of the pricing situation and you will get an idea if your budget is realistic or not.
2. Using PPC to find exact CPC numbers
Once you have a feeling for your market’s CPC and you are thinking about running a PPC campaign it is worth running a small test campaign to see how accurate these numbers are and what it would take to rank on the first page for your keywords. All you need to do is sign up for a PPC account with Google or MSN Ad Center (MSN is now serving PPC ads to Yahoo and Bing).
In the next step select your top 10 keywords and setup one campaign in your PPC account. For the ad just look at other ads that show up when you search for your keyword and write a quick ad based on what you see. Don’t put too much thought into this, since this is just a test. However make sure to include your keywords in the ad copy, since that will help with relevance.
Set the campaign to run for 2 days and set a daily budget that is high enough to give you at least 10 clicks based on your CPC estimates. Set the CPC for each keyword at the average CPC cost you received from the Google keyword tool.
Now start the campaign and monitor it. Once the campaign is started you can look at your keywords inside of your PPC account and you will be able to see the minimum bid for showing on the first page. If your bid is lower than that raise it to this number. Now you can see how many impressions you receive and in what position your ads show. Based on this data you can verify if the estimates were correct and if your budget still is high enough to run a PPC campaign.
With proper PPC optimization and management CPC can be significantly reduced over time. However for the first 3 months of a campaign expect to pay close to the first CPC numbers from your test campaign.
If you are looking for lower CPC yo can always research more long tail keywords and see if these have lower CPC. This might be another way to enter a competitive market with a lower budget.
If you are interested to learn more about using PPC for your online marketing and how to best optimize and mange your campaign feel free to contact us.
5 Ways to Combine your PPC Campaign with your SEO
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010
Many people think of PPC and SEO as two separate strategies and often ask if they should use SEO or PPC. Often it seems as if SEO and PPC are two separate departments that are fighting for funds and can’t get along. However there is another (healthier) way to look at this. PPC and SEO can actually compliment each other and work together to strengthen your online marketing.
So what are the best ways to combine SEO and PPC you ask?
Here are 5 strategies you should know about:
1. One great strategy is to use PPC to test keywords before you optimize your website for them. This can be great for competitive keywords that would take a lot of time and effort to rank for organically. The goal is to find the best performing keyword before you start your SEO. Also if have a large keyword list from your keyword research you can use PPC to narrow down the list by testing each phrase and find the best ones for your SEO campaign.
2. PPC can also help to expand your reach online. You can’t possibly be number one for all the relevant keyword combinations in your market, especially if you look at keyword keyword phrases with 3 words or more. PPC allows you to rank for all those long tail phrases you can’t address through your on site SEO or just don’t have the time to optimize for. In case you find some great performers you can always decide to add these to your organic SEO strategy.
3. You can reach different target markets. Is your website SEO setup for a specific target market? PPC can help you to test other target markets quick and easy. Just setup a new landing page and use PPC to get targeted traffic. This way you can find out if it makes sense to add a section to your website for the new target market or maybe even setup a new separate website for it. Never switch your on site SEO to a different target audience without proper data. If you want you can even test new products and find the best online marketing approach before starting your SEO campaign.
4. Sometime you need fast traffic for a contest, event or anything else. PPC can help you to speed things up short term. If you only have a limited amount of time to promote something you can setup your SEO and then use PPC to drive short term traffic. SEO usually takes longer to build stable high rankings, so with the proper budget you can drive a lot of targeted traffic to your website almost instantly by using PPC.
5. Good on site SEO will improve your Google AdWords quality score and you will pay less per click. This way you can get more results out of your PPC budget and use the money you save to build more long term organic rankings for your website. If you have a large PPC campaign optimize different landing pages on your website according to best SEO practice. This will make Google happy and you might be able to outrank your competitors on PPC with a considerable lower CPC.
As you can see there are many ways to combine PPC and SEO to improve your online marketing. If you want to learn more about how to apply these different strategies to your business feel free to contact us.
What the Yahoo and Bing Search Alliance means for you
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
Today Yahoo released another update on the new search alliance between Bing and Yahoo.
According to the Yahoo Blog at the end of this week both companies will start combining their organic search results. Both search engines organic results will then be supplied by Microsoft. Additional Yahoo and Bing PPC platforms will be combined as well later this year.
So what does all this mean for you?
The good news is that the top search engines to optimize for will be reduced to 2 instead of 3. Based on the latest Hitwise data Google and Bing (+ Yahoo) have a market share of about 95%. This means you can now focus on these 2 search engines with your SEO and cover most search engine searches.
The bad news is that Yahoo has about 15% of market share, so if your Yahoo rankings are currently much better than your Bing rankings you will probably lose out on some traffic. If Yahoo is a good source of organic traffic for you I would recommend to talk to your SEO consultant and find out what it takes to build up your rankings for Bing as well.
If Google is your main traffic source you won’t see much difference, but you might want to find out why your are not ranking in Bing. If you run a successful Google SEO campaign expanding to Bing could now provide you with 25% more traffic and it might be less difficult than you think to build top rankings in Bing as well.
When it comes to paid search this change will save advertisers money and time, since you can now run campaigns on Google and Bing and can save a lot of time and effort in managing a separate Yahoo PPC campaign. If you have not done any PPC on Yahoo or Bing you might want to look into it now, since the target audience you can reach is much larger and Microsoft’s PPC platform has been improved as well.
All in all, I feel this is a positive development, since it will make life for SEO companies and business owners easier and also reduce your spend on SEO and PPC. The only negative I can see is that this will very likely also increase competitiveness for Bing organic search rankings, which will force many people to step up their SEO game.
