Did you know you can use pay per click advertising to test your keywords? Not a lot of people do. I am actually surprised to talk with many of the high status firms who are still in the stone ages with their PPC campaigns.
When I get on the phone with many of these account executives, a question I often field is “Would you recommend that we run a PPC Campaign in conjunction with our SEO?” For those of you who are reading this – here’s your answer: Absolutely*.
You might have noticed that little “*” after. Because we deal with so many people from so many different companies and lifestyles, I do need to make sure that I explain this out a little bit. For us, SEO is always a sure thing. We’ve been able to do so well with everyone. All of our clients (yes ALL of them) see positive results. For us, we can certainly kick it into high gear with our clients if we can find the niche traffic keywords for our clients websites.
Let me explain. We actually can use the analytical information that we get from our clients PPC accounts to help determine what keywords are drawing attention, and what isn’t. Now if the PPC campaign becomes monetarily successful immediately, that’s a bonus. Even if it doesn’t the information that we can glean with in the first 60-90 days is almost priceless. I’m sure you are all aware that statistically you’ll se almost 70% of your search engine traffic from your “other than regular” keywords.
I’ll give you an example. In the last 30 days, it appears that we’ve had 47 unique visitors to www.netmark.com from the keywords “Idaho Falls Internet Service Provider”. There was actually one time a while back where we mentioned it one time in a blog post. Let me ask you: “Is that a key phrase we are looking to optimize ourselves for”? Nope. We often see visitors come to our website from many of the odd and crazy terms that we really haven’t spent too much time specifically optimizing for.
So again, should you run a PPC campaign at the same time as SEO? Not only can you, but you should. It’s a great way to determine if your keywords are profitable.
Everyone knows how to find the popular keywords for their industry. Have you ever heard something about a KEI – keyword effectiveness index. The KEI of a keyword is a way of determining which keywords are right for your website based on popularity and competitiveness. The problem is that it doesn’t measure how profitable those keywords may be for your website. While this might be a decent place to start to find good keywords, I certainly wouldn’t end there.
A good pay per click campaign around the best keywords for your market can tell you which keywords might be most profitable for you. If you get a lot of click-throughs for a certain keyword, that should be an indicator that you can attract traffic for that keyword. The conversions are up to your landing page. Landing pages are kind of a whole other topic that we’ll visit soon. Once you find your most profitable keywords, plug them into your ads and don’t forget the landing pages. Watch your analytics and grab this useful and important traffic information, and put it to work!
