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Showing posts with label ppc|seo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ppc|seo. Show all posts
  • Writing Ad Descriptions Keywords and PPC programs are just the beginning of your PPC campaign. Once you have the
    keywords that you plan to use, you have to begin putting them to work, and creating PPC ads is one way to do that. Creating a PPC ad isn’t usually too difficult. Each search engine or PPC company does it differently, but most have tutorials that walk you quickly through the ad process.

    Creating an ad and creating a great ad are not the same thing, though. Anyone can create an ad. And in some instances, that ad will work just fine for whatever purpose it was created. But if you really want to get the most from your PPC program, you should be adept at creating great ad descriptions that quickly catch potential visitors and entice them to come to your site. It may seem like an easy task, but in truth it’s pretty difficult.

    With a typical search engine description, the object is to entice as much traffic to a site as possible in the hopes of converting that traffic into customers. PPC requires a little a different approach. You don’t want to pay for unlikely prospects, so the description used in your PPC ads should be designed to eliminate those who are just window shopping, while attracting those who want nothing more than to buy your products, hire your services, or sign up for your newsletter. For this reason, your PPC ad description should describe exactly what your business offers. At the same time, proven marketing copy techniques should be employed to ensure that the description is enticing enough to attract ideal prospects.

    Relevancy is the name of the game when it comes to copywriting for paid listings, not only for your potential customers, but increasingly to meet the stringent requirements of the search engines themselves.

    Including your keyword in the title and description of your listing can increase your click-through rate and relevant listings are not only rewarded with more clicks from consumers but also with a higher position on SERPs.

    Writing ad copy for search engine listings is not only about knowing the right formula for creatinggood ads. Following good copywriting guidelines gets you past tough search engine editors, and in front of potential consumers. Understanding that, here are some suggestions for writing great ad copy:

    Use your keywords:Including your keywords in your advertisements can increase the
    efficiency of those ads. Additionally, if you’re using the keywords that you’ve selected, then your ads are likely to appear in conjunction with related topics, making it easier for you to entice traffic.

    Qualify your traffic:Creating an advertisement that people will click on is not enough.You must create an ad therightpeople will click on. Not all traffic is equal. Even people who earch with the same phrase might have different needs. One purpose of your ad is to appeal to your target audience, while signaling to anyone else that your business would not be a good fit for their differing needs.

    List features and benefits:In your ad description, include at least one feature and bene-
    fit for the product or services that you’re advertising with the PPC program. Generally, you have very little space in which to include a description, so choose the words that you planto use very carefully.

    Use a call to action:Too often, advertisements are created without including a call to action.However, studies show that including a call to action will increase your conversion rates,whereas ads that do not contain a call to action tend to perform less efficiently and effectively than those that include it.

    Stand out:Many PPC advertisers in the same areas will have very similar PPC advertisements. If you can create ads that stand out from these other, more generic ads, you have a much better chance of having an effective PPC program. It will be worth your time to spend some planning hours creating an ad that helps you stand out from the crowd. That extra effort will be well worth the results.

    Monitoring and Analyzing Results
    It’s been mentioned several times in passing in this chapter, but it’s essential that you see this message again:

    You’re not finished with your PPC campaign once you have it set up. PPC is not one of those programs you can set up and then walk away from and expect it to work properly. It is crucial to the successof any PPC campaign that it be monitored regularly, because positions can and do change every day.

    Apart from position monitoring, it is also important to track and analyze the effectiveness of individual keyword phrases on a monthly basis. Viewing click-through rates and studying visitor habits can lend valuable insight into their motivations and habits, and help to further refine your PPC program.

    These monitoring and analyzing activities must be ongoing. It’s not enough to say, “I’ll check on this PPC program next month.” Monitoring and analyzing PPC results should become part of your daily routine. In some cases, your rank in a search engine can change very rapidly. If you’re focused on your PPC program, however, you’ll likely find far more success (or at least the potential for success) if you regularly monitor and analyze the program’s results.

    by:bijesh kawan
    Writing Ad Descriptions

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  • Choosing Effective Keywords When you’re using keyword marketing to optimize your site, you can run into a lot of frustrating situations. Despite your best efforts, it’s possible that the keywords you select are just not generat-ing the traffic that you need. On the other hand, sometimes keywords that work well in the beginning will just stop working. You can tell when this happens because the numbers associated with your keywords (assuming you’re using a metrics program to track them) drop without warning or explanation.

    Many things can happen to make your keywords quit being as effective as they were in the past. And many times you didn’t do anything at all to make this happen. That’s why it’s essential to regularly develop concepts, test, and implement new keywords for your PPC programs and for your web site.


    Creating your first keyword list

    The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to your site, improve your conversion rate, and make yourself visible to search engines could easily give you a serious tension headache. Even using some of the techniques that have been discussed in this chapter to find the right keywords and perfect your methods of research take time. It’s not something that you can just jump into today and be successful at before the sun sets. It’s far more successful if you start slowly and build your way to greater success.

    You already know that you must first create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorming and asking customers are two ways to build that list. You can also include all of the keywords that are suggested by keyword suggestion tools, and you might even consider pulling out a thesaurus to find additional words and phrases that you haven’t considered. Come up with enough words to coverall the services your site offers and avoid broad or generic terms that are so ll-encompassing they apply to every site that’s even remotely related to yours. These words are incredibly difficult to rank high with and won’t drive quality traffic to your site. Instead, focus on words that are relevant but not overly used, and always keep your eyes open for those words that are very specific but highly targeted to your site or offerings.

    When creating your first keyword list, include all of the words that you can come up with. This
    part of selecting your keywords and phrases is actually easy. You can include everything and don’t have to worry about the quality of what you’re including until later. Unfortunately, because it is so easy to create this first list, many people make the assumption that PPC marketing is easy. This first step may be, but it does get much harder as you research and qualify words and phrases and then work those words and phrases into PPC marketing programs.

    Keywords and phrases will need constant revision, so you should always be creating that “first”
    keyword list. Keep a running list of words that will apply to your site. Each time something is changed on the site, or something changes in the field that you’re in, you’ll have to go through all
    of these steps again. If you are not constantly testing, analyzing, adding to, and removing nonper
    forming keywords and phrases as appropriate, you’ll find that PPC programs that worked really
    well in the beginning lose effectiveness over time.

    You’d better believe that your competition will be constantly monitoring and revising their keyword and PPC strategies. And if you’re not regularly taking advantage of all your keyword resources, you might as well hand over your customer lists to your competition, because they’re going to end up with all of your customers anyway.

    Keywords are what draw potential customers to your web site. These potential customers are
    either visitors who are ready to buy now or they’re browsers whom you can motivate into makingn a purchase or reaching a goal conversion that you’ve established. So remember that when you’re building your initial keyword list, you’re using a little educated guessing to get started in reaching highly qualified site visitors. Later, you can rely on specific keyword-related tools and analysis to replace your educated guesses with more concrete keywords and phrases that will help you reach your goals.

    Forbidden search terms and poison words

    When you’re creating your keyword lists, it’s important to keep in mind that some search terms will result not in higher quality visitors, but instead in either a low ranking or even complete removal from search listings. These aren’t just ineffective keywords and phrases. These are what are called forbidden search termsor poison words. These words are known to decrease your pages’ rankings if a search engine finds them in your site’s title, description, or even in the URL. These words can either kill or lower your pages in rankings.

    Here’s the problem with the forbidden or poison terms: there’s really no consistent or standard list of terms to which you can turn for guidance on the words you should not use. For example, vulgar words are usually considered to be forbidden or poison; however, you can do a search for one of these words and you’ll return a fair number of results. However, using the words in your site tag- ging as a means to rank high in a search will result in your site being buried or even omitted from search results.

    So although there are no official lists of words that search engines use for filtering inappropriate keywords, you can figure out some guidelines for yourself. Two types of words have the potential to create issues for your site if you use them as keywords within the site or for PPC marketing
    purposes:

    • Vulgar words
    • Politically incorrect words (these words are especially dangerous in countries like China and North Korea where censorship is prominent).
    Despite what seems like a simple list for types of words to avoid, it’s really not that simple. Many words can be excluded or even flagged by a search engine because those words are associated with search engine spam. When it becomes apparent that a word or term seems to be used strictly to rank highly, even when included on a page full of unrelated content or links, search engines will flag that word or phrase and will consider closely the relationship to other words and links on a page before making a ranking determination. The problem with that, however, is that as soon as search engines crack down on a word or phrase, another one pops up to take over.

    Now, don’t confuse poison words with keyword poison. Keyword poison is actually the use of keywords on your site far too many times. When you’re including keywords on your site, you should use them only as often as necessary and not one time more than that. If you throw your keywords into the site randomly, you’re poisoning the search term ranks and run the risk of having your site knocked farther down in the ranking or even having it delisted completely as spam.

    Finally, forbidden search terms and poison words are different from stop words. Stop words are those words that are so common on the Web that they are usually ignored by search engines and are completely useless in your PPC programs and other keyword marketing efforts. Here’s a brief list of some of the most common stop words, though there are dozens more that might be included:

    • A
    • An
    • The
    • But
    • E-mail
    • When
    • Where
    • How
    • Free
    • If
    • And
    • While
    • Or
    An example of how stop words are ignored in a search query is the search term “the sunny beach.”As shown in Figure5-7, when this search term is used on Google, the word “the” is ignored (as indicated by its solid black coloring, and lack of linking). The words “sunny beach,” then, are the only words that are included in the search (as indicated by the blue lettering of the words and the fact that they are links).



    Forecasting search volumes
    Once you have decided on your initial keyword list — and even after you’ve narrowed the list down some — you need to begin looking at the budget that you’ll have for use with a PPC program. One way to determine how much mileage you’ll get for the budget dollars that are allocated to your PPC program is to forecast search volumes. Forecasting allows you to control your marketing expenditures by predicting the performance of your keyword choices and desired positions. Simply put, for every amount invested, a company can predict a corresponding amount in sales. Before you get too deeply into forecasting search volumes, however, you should make a determina tion about what rank will work best for you. A number one rank is not always the best strategy for everyone. You will probably need to balance the volume of your keyword costs (clicks) withthe cost per acquisition(CPA).So, for example, if it costs you $2 per click to reach a number one slot in search results and your budget is for $100 per month, then you can only afford about 50 clicks per month (volume). These 50 clicks per month don’t equate to a great volume, therefore, you might consider a slightly lower ranking in the SERPs that will generate more volume within the budget that
    you have to spend.

    On the other hand, there is an exponential decrease in the number of clicks that you’ll receive as you decrease your ranking position. In general, there is about a 20 percent difference between the first and second ranking slots on a SERP. Each ranking slot below that increases the difference, so some experts estimate that being ranked first on a SERP might produce at least 10 times the traffic generated by a tenth-ranked site.

    Using this information and your budget availability, you can decide whether it’s cost effective to stay in a lower position, or if bidding for a higher spot would net greater click potential. Here’s the biggerquestion, however. Ranking higher will result in much more traffic, but does the additional traffic result in more goal conversions? If not, then spending the extra money to reach the top ranking slot is probably a waste of money.

    Carrying over our preceding example, if you’re paying $2 per click for a top ranking that generates 50 clicks per month, but only 1 percent of those visitors make a purchase from your site, you don’t have a good conversion rate. But if you were to change your keywords a bit to make them more specific and then reduce your cost per click to $1 for a slightly lower rank (let’s say a number three ranking slot) that generates 100 clicks per month, and those 100 clicks also resulted in a 1 percent conversion, you’re still reaching more conversion goals, and therefore making more money with the lower rank than you would be with the higher rank.


    So how exactly do you forecast search volumes and the cost associated with those volumes?
    It’s best to start by researching a keyword list that includes 100 to 300 keywords and phrases. Use a varied keyword list that includes both broad and specific terms. And during your research, use both personal investigation and keyword selection tools to determine the click volume and the cost per click for each of those terms. Using this information, you can then estimate search volumes and the cost of those search volumes, but additionally you can estimate other performance metrics that will help you to determine both the cost and the value of the keywords that you’ve selected. Those additional metrics include:

    • Projected Impressions
    • Estimated Click-Through Rate (CTR)
    • Estimated Clicks per Month
    • Average Cost per Click (CPC)
    • Estimated Budget Requirements

    Using this information, you can increase the effectiveness of the budget that you invest in your PPC program. For instance, keywords with lower CPC rates typically have less ompetition than more expensive ones. If you can select some of these keywords that are more efficient for creating goal conversions, then you’ve invested less in your PPC program for better results.

    One thing that’s important to understand, as you’re estimating your search volumes and the budget that you’ll invest into your PPC program, is that all of these projections are based on historical data. This means that you should collect data about your keywords and use it to improve your PPC program effectiveness over time. Additionally, you should know that there are many other factors seasonal changes, sales, competition, and even landing pages — that can affect your actual perform ance results. This is just another reason you should plan to constantly monitor and revise your keywords and phrases and your PPC marketing efforts.

    Forecasting search volumes and budget considerations is just the first step toward creating a PPC program that both meets your needs and fits within your budget. In addition to initial forecasting, you will also need to conduct ongoing keyword testing.

    Keyword testing is the process by which you examine keywords and how many searches they’re included in, as well as what the competition for those keywords is. Once you’ve completed that research, you begin to implement your keywords on your site very slowly, monitoring the results of your site traffic and goal conversions after each new word or set of words is added.

    It’s a time-consuming activity, but keyword testing has the potential to improve your PPC program results if you take the time do it properly. Through careful testing, you can learn what your most effective keywords are; then you can use those keywords to improve your position and impressions.

    One way to start the testing process is by understanding exactly what you are testing for. Are you testing to see how effective your most recent ad copy is? How do landing pages hold up in attracting and keeping site visitors? If those landing pages are experiencing a lot of bounces, you may need to work with them to create more stickiness. Other questions you may want to answer to ensure you understand what you’re testing for include: Are visitors reaching goal conversions? Does ad placement really make a difference?

    As you’re considering keyword testing, you may decide that you just don’t have time to efficiently forecast your PPC traffic. However, not taking the time to do the testing could result in wasted budget dollars. People add keywords to their pages, but that doesn’t mean that all keywords and PPC programs will be effective. It’s necessary to go through the proper testing steps to ensure that your PPC program is as efficient and effective as possible.
    Finalizing your keyword list

    A lot of effort has gone into creating, researching, and narrowing your keyword list so far. Now it’s time to finalize that list and begin putting your keywords and your PPC programs to work for you. Finalizing your keyword list doesn’t really mean that it’s completely final. As you’ve learned already, a keyword list (as it applies to PPC programs) is an ongoing element in your PPC program. You should constantly be changing and updating your keyword list. And this can be a very time-consuming process.

    The Long Tail of Search

    he Long Tail of Search is a concept created by Chris Anderson, an editor at Wired Magazine
    Tdefines the non-competitive keywords — usually three- to five-word phrases that site visitors use find web sites. The idea of non-competitive keywords and phrases relates to the more specific ter that you can use to describe your products or information. The concept of the Long Tail of Search is you begin any search with a very broad term. For example, if you’re searching for Italian dinner recipt that term is broad enough to return far too many results to be useful.
    Using the Long Tail theory, however, the more precise and less common keywords and phrases a usually the most effective. These are located at the end of the “tail” and are represented by a ve ry small tip (as if on the end of a tail).

    Normally, a product site gets visitors by several types of keywords and phrases:

    • Product names and brands
    • General keywords and phrases
    • Long-tail keywords and phrases
    The magnificence of the Long Tail of Search is that you don’t know how effective it is until you have optimized your site and have some content on your site to attract it. Sure, there will be some Long Tail queries in your logs, but it will be only a fraction of what could be there.

    To conquer the Long Tail of Search, you need to create a rich foundation of content. The tricky part is knowing what content to create. If your focus is on providing value to your customers, it’ll be easier for you.

    To capture the Long Tail, you need to create content that not only is relevant to your product or service, but is also related to your product or service, even if the relationship is remote. You do this because you need to target not only people who know about you and your product, or who know just what they need — that’s pretty simple — but you need to attract people who have the same problems as your target audience and who are looking for a solution.

    However, there are a few things that you can do to ensure that your final keyword list is the most effective and up-to-date list available to you:

    • Remove all of the unrelated search terms from your list. An unrelated term is a termthat doesn’t apply to your site in any way. You may have words or phrases on your list for which you have no web-site content at all. You have two choices here: Either createnew content specifically for those words, or just discard the words in favor of better targeted and more efficient PPC marketing.
    • Remove words for which the competition is too high. Unless you have an unlimited budget for your PPC program, you’ll want to eliminate keywords for which the competition is fierce. You won’t gain a number one slot by eliminating broad terms, but you may find that your job in optimizing your site becomes much easier.

    • Remove any keywords that your potential audience is likely to overlook or not use at all. You can usually tell what types of keywords your potential visitor will use when searching for our site, service, or product. This also means that you should remove any words that are industry buzzwords, but that someone outside of the industry might not consider using.
    Once you’ve narrowed your words to the most relevant keywords and phrases with an acceptable amount of competition, it’s time to start putting those keywords to work. Placing the keywords in the right place and using them properly will go a long way toward making your PPC program successful. But that’s all information that’s coming up in Chapter 6.

    by:bijeshkawan
    Choosing Effective Keywords

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  • Keyword Competitive Research Keyword research is the core of any SEO campaign and it is vitally important when developing PPC programs. You should choose carefully the keywords that are most effective, because the key- words selected during the research phase will be included in your web-site copy, as well as your PPC programs, and many other types of campaigns.

    To begin with, you should select valid keywords from a variety of sources, which include:

    Your own knowledge of the product or service that you’re marketing.From your own
    knowledge you should be able choose at least one word that characterizes that product or service. If you’re unable to select that word, spend some time getting to know your prod-ucts and services better.

    Your customers    .Your customers will be able to tell you what keywords they think of or use when searching for your product or service. Customers can be your best source forvalid and relevant keywords, because you’re trying to reach people just like them.

    Competitors’ web sites. Check your competitors’ web sites for additional keywords thatyou may not have considered during your initial brainstorming session. Obviously, if ourcompetitors are using these keywords, there will be some competition for them, but betterto have the competition than to be left outside the arena while the games are taking place.

    Keyword suggestion tools

    One tool that you should use when developing your keyword list is a keyword suggestion tool.Keyword suggestion tools are just that, tools that provide a list of suggested keywords based on a base word that you enter into the search tool. Some of the words returned may not have occurred to you when you were brainstorming keywords and talking to your customers about the words they would use. In addition, keyword suggestion tools provide some of the information that you’ll need to determine how much competition there is for the keywords and phrases you’re considering using .

    In the past, measuring the competition for your search terms was done by performing a search for each keyword or phrase using one search engine at a time. When the SERPs were returned, you could see how many times that keyword or phrase turned up. It was a tedious and ineffective method of keyword research. Today, keyword suggestion tools speed the competitive research process.

    Here’s how it works: first, you input your proposed keywords into a keyword suggestion tool, andit examines a database that contains millions of instances of keyword usage. Using these tools, youcan quickly learn how many users are conducting daily searches for that term, how many of thosesearches resulted in an actual visit, and what related search terms were used.

    Many keyword suggestion tools are available on the Web. Some of the top tools, which you’ll hearabout most often, include:

    Overture Keyword Selector Tool:Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool, shown in Figure5-2,
    shows you how many searches have been conducted over a given month for a keyword
    or phrase related to the search term you entered into the Selector Tool. You can find the
    Overture Keyword Selector Tool at this URL: http://inventory.overture.com/d/
    searchinventory/suggestion/
    Wordtracker:Wordtracker allows you to search for terms in the database of terms collected. This program tells you how often a keyword or phrase was searched for and howmany competing sites use the keywords. In addition, like Overture, the list of keywords and phrases returned may include words or phrases that you haven’t considered using. Additionally, Wordtracker offers a top 1,000 report that lists the most frequently searched-for terms and a Competition Search option that helps you determine the competitivenessof each phrase. This report is useful for figuring out how difficult it will be to reach a specific rank for any given term. You may also find keywords on this list that have low competition rates, but high relevancy. For example, Figure5-3 shows some of the results for aWordtracker search for the term “business technology writer.” As you can see in the figure,the term “writing business plan emerging technology” has very little competition. Therefore,if you have a site that includes information about writing business plans for emerging technology business, this keyphrase might be a good choice because there is little competition,but it can be a highly effective phrase. A free version of Wordtracker is available at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.
    Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool:The Trellian tool is a subscription tool (about $50 per
    month) that allows users to ascertain the market share value for a given search term, see
    how many users search for it daily, identify common spellings and misspellings, and dis-cover which terms are impacted by seasonal trends. Figure5-4 shows the some of the results that are returned with a Tellian search for “Sydney Hotel.” As you can see in the figure, each keyword or phrase returned includes information about the number of searches for the word in addition to having capability to analyze each word or phrase further.










    • Google AdWords Keyword Tool:Google’s Keyword Tool provides suggestions for additional words that you may not have considered. In the results shown in Figure5-5 (again using the term “business technology writer”), there are some graphs related to the number of times the words are searched for and to the competition that you might face if you select that word. However, there are no actual numbers, so your decisions about competition will include a high element of guesswork.
    What you might find unique about the Google Keyword Tool is the ability to have the tool examine your web page or even your entire web site and make suggestions for keywords and phrases that might be useful in marketing your site. The results of such a search, as illustrated in Figure5-6, may include terms that you haven’t considered.

    One thing that you should remember as you’re using any of these keyword suggestion tools is thatyou’re not only checking to see how competitive a keyword is, but you’re also checking to see if it’s popular, and you’re keeping your eyes open for those unexpected keywords that are not highly competitive but are completely relevant to your site.

    While you’re testing potential new terms, it’s also a good idea to test any keywords that your site is already using to see which ones are effective and which are not. The keywords that are effective meaning those that result in visitors and goal conversions — are the keywords to hang on to. Any that aren’t performing well should be replaced with new keywords.

    What this means is that your keyword research is an ongoing chore. Because your site is likely to
    change over time, your keywords will also change. Therefore, it’s necessary for you to conduct reg ular keyword research to see which keywords or phrases are working and which are not, as well as to add new keywords to your list.




    • In doing your keyword research, here are some basic guidelines you can follow to ensure that you’reconducting the most thorough research while being highly efficient:
    • Search from the point of view of your potential customers.
    • Select as many relevant keywords or phrases as possible.
    • Monitor your keywords to see which attract your target audience. Keep those that perform and replace those that do not.
    • Select keywords and phrases that aren’t the most competitive but also not the least competitive. These medium competitive words should yield good results without eating a ridiculous amount of your budget.
    Keyword Competitive Research
    by :bijesh kawan

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  • Understanding How PPC Affects SEO There’s a lot of debate about how an organization should use organic keyword marketing versus
    the way those same organizations should use PPC marketing. And there seem to be two (and pos
    sibly three) distinct camps about what should and shouldn’t happen with these different types of marketing.

    The first position is that PPC programs can hurt organic keyword programs. According to subscribers to this position, PPC programs damage organic rankings because the act of paying for a listing auto- matically reduces the rank of your organic keyword efforts. Those who follow this theory believe thatthere is no place for PPC programs.


    Another position in this argument is that PPC has no effect at all on SEO. It’s a tough concept to
    swallow, because one would naturally believe that any organization payingfor a specific rank in
    search returns would automatically push organic keyword returns into a lower slot (which sup-
    ports the first theory). Those who follow this theory believe that there is no need to invest in PPC,because you can achieve the same results with organic keywords, though it takes much longer forthose results to become apparent.


    The most widely held belief, however, is that a combination of PPC and organic keywords is the best approach. This theory would seem to have a lot of validity. According to some researchers, PPC pro-grams tend to be much more effective if an organization also has organic keywords that rank in the same area as the PPC ranks. For example, if you’ve bid on a keyword that’s consistently placed num-ber two or three in search engine returns, and you have organic keywords that fall in the next few slots, you’re likely to find better conversion numbers than either organic keywords or PPC programs can bring on their own.

    It’s important to note here that all search engines make a distinction between PPC and organic SEO.PPC doesn’t help your organic rankings. Only those activities like tagging your web site properly,using keyword placement properly, and including great content on your site will help you on the organic side. PPC is a search marketing strategy.


    PPC Is NotPaid Inclusion!

    one distinction that is important for you to understand is the difference between PPC and paid-
    Oinclusion (PI) services. Many people believe that PPC and PI services are the same type of mar-keting, but there can be some subtle differences. For starters, paid-inclusion services are used bysome search engines to allow web-site owners to pay a one-year subscription fee to ensure that theirsite is indexed with that search engine all the time. This fee doesn’t guarantee any specific rank insearch engine results; it only guarantees that the site is indexed by the search engine.

    Yahoo! is one company that uses paid inclusion to populate its search index. Not all of the listings
    in Yahoo! are paid listings, however. Yahoo! combines both normally spidered sites and paid sites.

    Many other search engines have staunchly avoided using paid-inclusion services — Ask.com and
    Google are two of the most notable — because most users feel that paid inclusion can skew the
    search results. In fact, search engines that allow only paid-inclusion listings are not likely to survivevery long, because users won’t use them.

    There is a bit of a gray line between paid inclusion and PPC. That line begins at about the point whereboth services are paid for. Detractors of these types of programs claim that paying for a listing — anylisting — is likely to make search returns invalid because the theory is that search engines give higher ranking to paid-inclusion services, just as they do to PPC advertisements.

    NOTE
    Throughout this book, you’ll like see the terms SEO and search marketing used inter changeably. Very strictly speaking, search marketing and SEO are quite different activities.Search marketing includes any activity that improves your search engine rankings — paid or organic.SEO, on the other hand, usually refers to strictly the free, organic methods used to improve search rank-ings. Very often, the two terms are used interchangeably by people using SEO and search engine marketing techniques. SEO and SEM experts, however, will always clearly differentiate the activities.

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  • Pay-per-Click Categories Pay-per-click programs are not all created equal. When you think of PPC programs, you probably
    think of keyword marketing — bidding on a keyword to determine where your site will be placed in search results. And that’s an accurate description of PPC marketing programs as they apply to keywords. However, there are two other types of PPC programs, as well. And you may find that targeting a different category of PPC marketing is more effective than simply targeting keyword
    PPC programs.

    Keyword pay-per-click programs
    Keyword PPC programs are the most common type of PPC programs. They are also the type this book focuses on most often. By now, you know that keyword PPC programs are about bidding on keywords associated with your site. The amount that you’re willing to bid determines the placement of your site in search engine results.

    In keyword PPC, the keywords used can be any word or phrase that might apply to your site.
    However, remember that some of the most common keywords have the highest competition for
    top spot, so it’s not always advisable to assume that the broadest term is the best one. If you’re in a specialized type of business, a broader term might be more effective, but as a rule of thumb, the more narrowly focused your keywords are, the better results you are likely to have with them. (And PPC will cost much less if you’re not using a word that requires a $50 per click bid.)


    NOTE
    Did you know that Google and Yahoo! have $100 caps on their keyword bids? They do.Imagine paying $100 per click for a keyword. Those are the kinds of keywords that will likely cost you far more money than they will generate for you. It’s best if you stick with keywords and phrases that are more targeted and less expensive.

    The major search engines are usually the ones you think of when you think keyword PPC programs, and that’s fairly accurate. Search PPC marketing programs such as those offered by vendors like Google,Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN are some of the most well-known PPC programs.


    Product pay-per-click programs
    You can think of product pay-per-click programs as online comparison shopping engines or price
    comparison engines. A product PPC program focuses specifically on products, so you bid on place-ment for your product advertisements.

    The requirements for using a product PPC program are a little different from keyword PPC programs,however. With a product PPC, you must provide a feed— think of it as a regularly updated pricelistfor your products — to the search engine. Then, when users search for a product your links are givenprominence, depending on the amount you have bid for placement. However, users can freely displaythose product listings returned by the search engine in the order or price from lowest to highest ifthat is their preference. This means that your product may get good placement initially, but if it’s not the lowest-priced product in that category, it’s not guaranteed that your placement results will stay infront of potential visitors.

    Some of these product PPC programs include Shopping.com, NexTag, Pricegrabber, and hopzilla.


    NOTE
    Although product PPC programs are popular for controlling the placement of your product listings, there are some services, like Google Base, that allow you to list yourproducts in their search engine for free. These product PPC programs still require a product feed,however, to keep product listings current.

    Implementing a product feed for your products isn’t terribly difficult, although, depending on the
    number of products you have, it can be time-consuming. Most of the different product PPC programs have different requirements for the product attributes that must be included in the productfeed. For example, the basic information included for all products are an item title, the direct linkfor the item, and a brief description of the item.

    Some of the additional attributes that you may need to include in your product PPC listings include:

    • title
    • description
    • link
    • image_link
    • product_type
    • upc
    • price
    • mpn (Manufacturer’s Part Number)
    • isbn
    • id

    Some product PPC programs will require XML-formatted feeds; however, most will allow textdelimited Excel files (simple CSV files). This means you can create your product lists in an Excelspreadsheet, and then save that spreadsheet as text delimited by selecting File ?Save As and ensuring the file type selected is text delimited.

    Service pay-per-click programs
    When users search for a service of any type, such as travel reservations, they are likely to use search engines related specifically to that type of service. For example, a user searching for the best price for hotel reservations in Orlando, Florida, might go to TripAdvisor.com. Advertisers, in this case hotel chains, can choose to pay for their rank in the search results using a service PPC program.

    Service PPC programs are similar to product PPC programs with the only difference being the type of product or service that is offered. Product PPC programs are more focused on e-commerce prod- ucts, whereas service PPC programs are focused on businesses that have a specific service to offer.

    Service PPC programs also require an RSS feed, and even some of the same attribute listings as prod-uct PPC programs. Some of the service PPC programs you might be familiar with are SideStep.comand TripAdvisor.com. In addition, however, many product PPC programs have expanded to include services. One such vendor is NexTag.

    TIP
    Inaddition to the three categories of PPC programs discussed in this text, there is anTIP additional one. Pay-per-call is a type of keyword advertising in which search results include a phone number. Each time a call is connected through that phone number, the company that owns the number is charged for the advertising, just as if it were paying for a traditional pay-
    per-click service.

    Pay-per-Click Categories
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  • Determining visitor value So the first thing that you need to do when you begin considering PPC strategies is to determine
    how much each web-site visitor is worth to you. It’s important to know this number, because other-wise you could find yourself paying far too much for keyword advertising that doesn’t bring the traf-fic or conversions that you’d expect. For example, if it costs you $25 to gain a conversion (or sale)but the value of that conversion is only $15, then you’re losing a lot of money. You can’t afford thatkind of expenditure for very long.

    To determine the value of each web-site visitor, you’ll need to have some historical data about thenumber of visitors to your site in a given amount of time (say a month) and the actual sales num-bers (or profit) for that same time period. This is where it’s good to have some kind of web metricsprogram to keep track of your site statistics. Divide the profit by the number of visitors for the sametime frame, and the result should tell you (approximately) what each visitor is worth.

    Say that during December, your site cleared $2,500. (In this admittedly simplified example, we’reignoring various things you might have to figure into an actual profit and loss statement.) Let’s alsosay that during the same month, 15,000 visitors came to your site. Note that this number is for allthe visitors to your site, not just the ones who made a purchase. You divide your $2,500 profit byallvisitors, purchasers or not, because this gives you an accurate average value of every visitor toyour site. Not every visitor is going to make a purchase, but you have to go through a number ofnon-purchasing visitors to get to those who will purchase.

    Back to the formula for the value of a visitor. Divide the site profit for December ($2,500) by the
    number of visitors (15,000) and the value of your visitors is approximately $.17 per visitor. Note
    that I’ve said approximately, because during any given month (or whatever time frame you choose)the number of visitors and the amount of profit will vary. The way you slice the time can changeyour average visitor value by a few cents to a few dollars, depending on your site traffic. (Also notethat the example is based on the value of all visitors, not of conversions, which might be a more validreal-life way of calculating the value of individual visitors. But this example is simply to demonstrate the principle.)

    The number you got for visitor value is a sort of breakeven point. It means you can spend up to
    $.17 per visitor on keywords or other promotions without losing money. But if you’re spending
    more than that without increasing sales and profits, you’re going in the hole. It’s not good businessto spend everything you make (or more) to draw visitors to the site. But note the preceding itali-
    cized words. If a $.25 keyword can raise your sales and profits dramatically, then it may be worth
    buying that word. In this oversimplified example, you need to decide how much you can realisti-
    cally spend on keywords or other promotions. Maybe you feel a particular keyword is powerful
    enough that you can spend $.12 per click for it, and raise your sales and visitor value substantially.You have to decide what profit margin you want and what promotions are likely to provide it. As you can see, there are a number of variables. Real life is dynamic, and eludes static examples. But whatever you decide, you shouldn’t spend everything you make on PPC programs. There are far too many other things that you need to invest in.

    Popular keyword phrases can often run much more than $.12 per click. In fact, some of the most
    popular keywords can run as much as $50 (yes, that’s Fifty Dollars) per click. To stretch your PPCbudget, you can choose less popular terms that are much less expensive, but that provide goodresults for the investment that you do make.

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  • How Pay-per-Click Works Pay-per-click marketing is an advertising method that allows you to buy search engine placement by bidding on keywords or phrases. There are two different types of PPC marketing.

    In the first, you pay a fee for an actual SERP ranking, and in some cases, you also pay a per-click feemeaning that the more you pay, the higher in the returned results your page will rank.

    The second type is more along true advertising lines. This type of PPC marketing involves bidding on keywords or phrases that appear in, or are associated with, text advertisements. Google is robably the most notable provider of this service. Google’s AdWords service is an excellent example of how PPC advertisements work, as is shown in Figure


    PPC advertisements are those advertisements that you see at the top and on the sides of search pages.

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  • ppc|seo pay-per-click (PPC) is one of those terms that you hear connected to
    keywords so often you might think they were the conjoined twins of
    PSEO. They’re not, really. Keywords and PPC do go hand in hand, but it
    is possible to have keywords without PPC. It’s not always advisable, however.

    Hundreds of PPC services are available, but they are not all created equal.
    Some PPC services work with actual search rankings, whereas others are
    more about text advertisements. Then there are the category-specific PPC
    programs, such as those for keywords, products, and services.

    The main goal of a PPC program is to drive traffic to your site, but ideally
    you want more out of PPC results than just visits. What’s most important is
    traffic that reaches some conversion goal that you’ve set for your web site.
    To achieve these goal conversions, you may have to experiment with differ-
    ent techniques, keywords, and even PPC services.

    PPC programs have numerous advantages over traditional search engine
    optimization:
    • No changes to a current site design are required. You don’t have to change any code or add any other elements to your site. All you have to do is bid on and pay for the keywords you’d like to target.
    • PPC implementation is quick and easy. After signing up for a PPC program, it might only take a few minutes to start getting targetedtraffic to your web site. With SEO campaigns that don’t includePPC, it could take months for you to build the traffic levels that PPC can build in hours (assuming your PPC campaign is well targeted).
    • PPC implementation is also quick and easy, and it doesn’t require any specialized knowledge. Your PPC campaigns will be much better tar- geted, however, if you understand keywords and how they work
    Aswith any SEO strategy, there are limitations. Bidding for keywords can be fierce, with eachcompetitor bidding higher and higher to reach and maintain the top search results position. Many organizations have a person or team that’s responsible for monitoring the company’s position in search results and amending bids accordingly. Monitoring positions is crucial to maintaining good placement however, because you do have to fight for your ranking, and PPC programs can become prohibitively expensive. The competitiveness of the keywords or phrases and the aggressiveness of the competitiondetermine how much you’ll ultimately end up spending to rank well.

    NOTE
    One issue with PPC programs is that many search engines recognize PPC ads as just that — paid advertisements. Therefore, although your ranking with the search engine for which you’re urchasing placement might be good, that doesn’t mean your ranking in other search engines will be good. Sometimes, it’s necessary to run multiple PPC campaigns if you want to rank high in multiple search engines.

    Before you even begin to use a PPC program, you should consider some basics. A very important
    point to keep in mind is that just because you’re paying for placement or advertising space associ-ated with your keywords, you’re not necessarily going to get the best results with all of the keywords or phrases that you choose. With PPC services you must test, test, and test some more. Begin small,with a minimum number of keywords, to see how the search engine you’ve selected performs in terms of the amount of traffic it delivers and how well that traffic converts into paying customers.

    An essential part of your testing is having a method in place that allows you to track your return on investment. For example, if your goal is to bring new subscribers to your newsletter, you’ll want totrack conversions, perhaps by directing the visitors funneled to your site by your PPC link to a sub-scription page set up just for them. You can then monitor how many clicks actually result in a goalconversion (in this case a new subscription). This helps you to quickly track your return on invest-ment and to determine how much you’re paying for each new subscriber.
    Before investing in a PPC service, you may want to review a few different services to determine
    which is the best one for you. When doing your preliminary research, take the time to ask the
    following questions:



    • How many searches are conducted each month through the search engine for which you’re considering a PPC program?
    • Does the search engine have major partners or affiliates that could contribute to the volume of traffic you’re likely to receive through the PPC program?
    • How many searches are generated each month by those partners and affiliates?
    • What exactly are the terms of service for search partners or affiliates?
    • How does the search engine or PPC program prevent fraudulent activity?
    • How difficult is it to file a report about fraudulent activity and how quickly is the issueaddressed (and by whom)?
    • What recourse do you have if fraudulent activity is discovered?
    • Do you have control over where our listing does appear? For example, can you choosenot to have your listing appear in search results for other countries where your site is not relevant? Or can you choose to have your listing withheld from affiliate searches?
    When you’re looking at different PPC programs, look for those that have strict guidelines about
    how sites appear in listings, how partners and affiliates calculate visits, and how fraud is handled.
    These are important issues, because in each case, you could be stuck paying for clicks that didn’t
    actually happen. Be sure to monitor any service that you decide to use to ensure that your PPC
    advertisements are both working properly and that they seem to be targeted well.It often takes a lot of testing, monitoring, and redirection to find the PPC program that works wellfor you. on’t be discouraged or surprised if you find that you must try several different programsor many different keywords before you find the right combination. But through a system of trial band error and diligent effort, you’ll find that PPC programs can help build your site traffic and goal conversions faster than you could without the program.

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