27 / January 2016, Matt
SEO marketing works to build your web traffic organically, by using keywords and content to attract traffic to your website. This should be the foundation of your work to build traffic, as it requires quality information and writing that will bring people back to your website after they find it for the first time.
Still, supplementing your SEO site with pay-per-click, or PPC advertising, can provide important benefits for you in terms of directing potential customers to you. It works for some of the same reasons as SEO does, and if employed well, can go a long way toward helping you build your site rank and customer base.
The first step in building out a PPC marketing plan is to identify the keywords and keyword phrases on which you want to bid. There is an art to this research. You want to select keywords that are relevant to your business, of course, and also keywords that people are actually using. After all, the most relevant keywords only matter if people are searching them.
On the other hand, you also want to balance the prevalence of the keyword searches against the level of competition you will face, and related, the amount you will need to bid to get successful ad placements. If you are a massage therapist, for example, the keyword phrase “massage therapy” is obviously relevant, but it will face stiff competition among the myriad other massage therapy providers.
One helpful hint is to research long-tail versions of the keywords and related phrases that potential customers may be searching. “Massage therapists in Albuquerque” may narrow your competition while still pulling in many who are searching.
Finally, look into what others are paying for the keyword phrases. Reports on the cost of PPC are available and can give you a basis for what to bid, and also help you set your budget once you estimate how many clicks you will get. These estimates should be replaced by actual data once you begin a campaign. If certain keywords are not generating hits, or if their hits do not result in a good conversion rate, you want to tweak your bidding strategy accordingly, dropping the least valuable keywords and replacing them with something that can do more for you.
It also works in the other direction. If you identify a high-volume keyword phrase with reasonably low competition but do not yet have content for that phrase, that should provide a good concept for the next post or article you place on your site. Your SEO content and PPC marketing should not be seen as separate entities, but rather as parts of a cohesive strategy to drive traffic and convert that traffic into sales.
The most obvious benefit of this kind of advertising is that you are only paying for results. If an ad does not lead to a visit to your site, you will not pay for that ad. Further, all of the clicks on your site come from someone who was looking at material relevant to your business. The traffic directed to you should be of a higher quality in terms of your ability to convert visits into sales.
As you enter the world of PPC advertising, you also set your own budget through the bidding process. Since the cost is directly tied to the traffic you gain, everything you spend has the potential to lead to a sale.
Of course, both the number of clicks to your website and this potential for sale are tied in turn to the quality of your site and the content there. Just as organic traffic through SEO depends on your posting regular, relevant, well-written content on your site. 1st in SEO can help deliver the content that gives you not only organic search rankings, but higher conversion from PPC marketing as well. Contact us today to get started.
