Making search work
April 11, 2008
You need both pieces of search engine marketing to make it work
People ask me which search engine marketing strategy they should concentrate on, free or paid. I tell them it’s like a sandwich: it just doesn’t work with only one slice of bread!
To get the most traffic - and the most sales - combine the power of both organic and pay-per-click search engine marketing. Together, they’ll help you reach your goals of more traffic and more sales in both the short AND long term.
The trick is to use both strategies so they build on each other.
Step 1. Do your keyword research and then build a content-rich site around keywords your market is searching on.
Step 2. Now pile on some pay-per-click advertising, with each ad built on a single keyword. Use PPC to bring more visitors to your site and measure your sales per visitor, called your sales conversion rate. Your PPC campaign will quickly show you which keywords bring in the most visitors, which result in the most sales… and which ones are duds.
Step 3. Take the best-performing keywords from your PPC campaigns and tweak your site with them. By emphasizing them in your content and code, you’ll start ranking well for those keywords in the organic listings (the regular listings that come up when someone uses a search engine).
You can even build "landing pages" — when you find a group of top-performing keywords, you can build a page around them that contains specific information to appeal to searchers who are using those keywords.
PPC will bring first-time visitors flocking to your site for the answers to their search. By finding out what works in PPC, you can adjust the keywords on your site to get a higher search engine higher ranking, so over time you’ll build up your free traffic.
And here’s a bonus! If you can get both your PPC ads and your organic listings on the same page of the search results, you’ll have a search engine marketing strategy that’s far greater than the sum of its parts.
SEO and PPC, with a delicious keyword filling… it’s a search sandwich!
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Thanks for the excellent tips.
I hear people constantly referring to the importance of using PPC. They make it sound simple. Find a good keyword, write PPC ads around that keyword and the traffic will come, along with the sales.
I’ve tried to get PPC to work for years - finally buying several excellent, top selling manuals on how to make PPC work - Google Cash, Adwords Miracle, and a few others. Despite all my efforts using the tips and advice provided, it seems increasingly evident that PPC isn’t nearly as easy as people make it sound.
Why do you suppose that is?
It’s almost as if there’s a missing element people aren’t telling us about how to succeed with PPC. Perhaps people like you who have already succeeded with PPC have forgotten along the way how they overcame that obstacle and miss telling us that little ’secret’.
Any idea what that missing element might be, beyond choosing excellent, well-searched keywords and writing ads that relate to our sites?
Thanks.
Thank you for the tip there.
I just copied and printed out this page to keep it for my future reference for myself. Anyway i know some people who “model” successful ppc advertisers and come out with far better ads for themselves.
Thats about it. =) i’ve never tried ppc marketing though. I would in the future though
I just want to add some observations on PPC.
Mr X discussed the Stupid Tax and StomperNet told a similar story with Naked 3 focus.
Secondly I think Google are hyping the prices. $ per click is just not on. It should still be 10 cents.
My suggestions;
Try Yahoo (my Yahoo campaign is 800% up see my blog) and MSN.
Although it is insane, Google seems to only understand focus. I mean extreme focus. 1 phrase per page. 1 phrase in page title headline and first HTML element. I just bought a course on using CSS to ensure the raw text was Google order idiot proof.
I can’t tell you how stupid I think Google is. For a search engine you;d think they could cope with semantics and multiple discipline and topic web sites.
instead they play directly in to the hands of link farm and VRE spammers.
I have paused all my Google campaigns as I do not want to create 1 word web pages. It is not what my human READERS want.
So I wait for Google to wake up and realise that you don’t say egg without saying toast and/or bacon and/or chips and/or etc..
Allegedly if you do this focus, your PPC rate will plummet. I did see some evidence of this in a test campaign, but it isn’t a game I am going to play with a self appointed search engine.
Social Search works on an almost opposite logic.
I think and hope Google are going to lose this one.
BTW there is a major tip about Google campaigns on my blog.
Peter