SEO and PPC Campaigns

Good SEO will focus on organic search results, natural linking and proper content optimization – but sometimes you need a little traffic to get the ball rolling, A well run PPC campaign can help you get that boost. However, PPC is also all about SEO – from the way you keyword your ads, to what pages you link to from them, to how you get your visitors to convert once they hit your landing page. If your PPC cost outweighs the benefit you may need to do some adjusting so your ROI will increase; these four tips can help.

1. Plan your campaign carefully. You should have a deep focus on your selected niche, with particular care paid to keyword selection to target high converting visitors. This means doing keyword research and phrasing your ads very carefully. Your ad-spend should show results by the end of four to six weeks or you are just pouring good money after wasted dollars.

Unlike regular organic SEO, paid ads should work fairly quickly and don’t have an extended ramp up time. If you are getting a lot of clicks but next to no conversions, you are losing customers before they commit. You need to figure out how to convince them to take that all important step and commit to a buy. Once you start making sales, you can analyze what you changed and what caused the turnaround.  Using varied test groups against each other is the best way to find out what works – test, test, and test – using split tests at the same time to measure accurate results.

2. Don’t use your landing page as your home page, unless all you sell is one product and one product only. Your homepage needs to be focused on your whole offering, not just one product. The landing page can be tighter and very narrowly aimed at selling just one thing. You also can be more salesman-like on a landing page, and keep your home page from being annoying to casual visitors who don’t want a hard sales pitch right away.

3. Your main keywords / phrases should be optimized for in both your ad and your landing page. ‘Buy — now!’ is a common phrase, or ‘shop best prices —-‘. You can mention a sale, discount, or free shipping, and plug geographic locales to get local traffic (city name, state)

4. Use analytics tools to track your results! This allows you to see what terms are converting and what aren’t. If you are having trouble ranking for results organically, you can switch to targeting those in a highly focused ad campaign and work on long tail SEO for less popular phrases while building links and strengthening your site for harder to reach phrases. Conversions should come in no matter what way a targeted searcher comes to your page.

Establishing ads that work takes time, and SEO is an integral part of any PPC campaign, so ask your SEO firm for suggestions on how to maximize your traffic and profits.