Mar 09 2011

Pay Per Click Strategies – Part One

When plotting Pay Per Click strategies for your business, the first thing to think about is what approach you have taken with SEO (Search Engine Optimization.) SEO can be a far more effective, and cost-effective method of advertising your business. Indeed these days a great many SEO companies and SEO experts ignore Pay Per Click because they consider SEO to be the superior methodology, producing superior results. And in some respects they are right, because a higher percentage of people will click on the organically produced search results than the paid for sponsored results. But that is not to say there is no place for PPC.

There is an argument that PPC should always be used as a complimentary marketing strategy in addition to Pay Per Click, for the simple reason that while Search Engine Optimisation can take approximately six months to get up and running, Pay Per Click can be operating at full steam within a week. For this reason PPC is immensely useful in kick starting a promotional campaign and leading the advertising strategy until the organic search results start to come into the rankings. Similarly, PPC allows the company to setup sales and landing pages without having to think about key words, search phrases and optimized text and concentrate solely on promotion and presentation – perhaps using images or Flash, for example.

So, if used wisely there is a place for PPC. Once you know your budget and have set your maximum spend, and once you are aware what your competition is spending, you should then follow a set Pay Per Click strategy. In these two articles we will examine the steps you should take on your own PPC strategy.

Step One – Establish and Set Up a Large Number of Relevant Keyword Phrases.

Firstly then, you need to establish your market, research that market and build you r keyword selection. Establishing this pool of keywords is crucial and SEO & PPC experts use a number of tools for this job. Some of the popular ones are Keyword Grabber, Good Keywords Professional, Overture, Hypertracker and Wordtracker. These tools help you to not only track the most popular search terms (and the most expensive) but also the variations that you might not necessarily think of. In addition, you should sit down and write a list of the first ten or fifteen search terms that pop into your head to describe your business or product, including product names, product codes, product generic names and competitor’s names too as well as any questions that people may enter into the search engine that your product may answer. Lastly, one of the best ways to do keyword research, and one of the most old fashioned, is to step outside of the SEO & PPC bubble and stop thinking like an SEO professional. Instead, ask your friends and family what they would type into the search engine if they were searching for a product like yours.

Once you have the keywords you are up and running however, there is still work to do. Too many people think that once they have researched keywords the hard work is done. In part two of this article we will examine three more steps to ensure you get the best return on your PPC investment.

Alex Simmonds is a journalist and freelance copywriter based in the UK. He currently writes a number of blogs on everything from cricket to jazz. He also writes a financial blog for The Bedouin Group