Using a PPC Campaign alongside SEO for Business
Posted by admin on December, 7th 2010
SEO is the key to long term success but PPC (pay per click) is ideal for making quick amounts of instant profit.
When we perform SEO for our clients sometimes the links can several weeks to several months to take effect and position a site highly in the search engines. When you have a fully functioning site that is likely to convert visitors into sales it would be a crime to waste time and wait for natural traffic when there’s perfectly good traffic out there which can be bought.
PPC is a numbers game, you need to make more profit out of it than you spend on advertising, for example:
- Let’s say your website converts on average with 1 sale out of 50 visitors.
- You bid on one keyword which has an average cost per click of £0.50.
- You make £30 profit per sale.
Therefore:
1 Sale @ £30 Profit = 50 Clicks x £0.50 CPC = £25 in Advertising Costs = £5 Total Profit
The example above would be a profitable PPC Campaign but obviously there will be many keywords involved with different cost per clicks and different average conversion rates per keyword. Below are tips to keep the profit levels higher than the advertising costs…
Tips for an effective PPC Campaign
It may be a mystery to a lot of people but starting an effective PPC Campaign isn’t as scary as it sounds:
- The most important thing is to read as much as you can about Google’s PPC platform “Adwords” – See some official tips here
- Once you have learned the basics then ensure that your website will actually sell by testing it out with several people from different backgrounds on all the most popular browsers
- Start with popular keywords found with Google’s Keyword Tool, make sure you change the setting from “broad” to “exact” on the left hand side to see how many people exactly type that keyword in
- Look closely at your keywords, some may have vast traffic levels but are they too generic for your website? Narrow down keywords to specific areas of your website.
- Create a campaign on Google Adwords, only make the ads visible to your target location (i.e. if you run a restaurant in Leeds then just show the adverts to people in Leeds)
- People don’t tend to buy items in the early hours or make B2B calls after 5PM, only show your ads when they are most likely to work
- Forget advertising on Google’s search network unless you have a huge budget, traffic tends to convert a lot less from Google Adsense
- Create an Ad group for each group of very similar keywords, this allows you to create different ads for each keyword
- For each Ad group advert link to the appropriate inner page of your website to show the visitor exactly what they were after right away
- For each Ad group add the main keyword in the title of the advert, these get the highest number of clicks when shown
- Use phrase match for your keywords, not broad match that may bring up un-related adverts
- Use negative keywords to counteract any unwanted keywords that may be brought up in a phrase type match (for example if you sell cold water dispensers and you bid on the phrase match keyword “water dispensers” then you wouldn’t want you ad appearing when someone types in “hot water dispensers”)
- Set up Adwords to link to your Google Analytics account and install conversion tracking code onto your final landing page such as a “Thankyou for Purchasing” page. Now you can see which keywords bring in bad traffic and which keywords end up creating conversions for your site.
- Lastly, start gingerly and slowly ramp up you daily spend, if something goes wrong in the early stages then you wouldn’t want it to be a big blow to your funds. Only when clear profit is being made should you consider increasing your daily spend and/or bid on more generic keywords
Why SEO is still important
Just relying on PPC campaigns is a dangerous game and has these disadvantages:
- When you stop paying for links you stop earning money; there are no free sales
- Visitors are LESS likely to convert into customers when clicking on advertisements over natural SERPS (proven on several ecommerce sites we manage)
- All websites crash from time to time and need resetting, if this happens whilst you’re paying for ads then it’s money instantly down the drain
- If you haven’t thought of a keyword that will attract the right visitors then you will always miss out on that portion of potential sales
- Advertising costs are going up and competition online is growing stronger; you could find yourself pushed out of the market over time
- Your website is a simple sales channel instead of an actual asset that can be sold or used in the future; a highly ranked website can be worth many, many thousands
- You add more risk when increasing the daily spend on a pay per click campaign; one mistake on the keyboard could cost dearly when playing with big budgets
- Paid advertising rules and systems change quite regularly; one day you may be banned from advertising your product/service or automatically knocked down the listings
We recommend that you use PPC whilst starting up a new website and build it’s power up in the search engines using SEO techniques at the same time. Using PPC will give a clear picture of how users interact with your site (through analytical data which should be setup) and also allow you to start optimising for conversions. If your PPC campaign is successful then you’ll have TWO channels of profit to your site and can invest in other ways to improve your business.
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