A Story we hear allot!
If you are spending too much money for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, then you likely have considered moving away from PPC and towards organic search results. After all, if you rank well in the organic, or natural, search results, you can spend a lot less money on PPC. But how do you do that? In this article, I will explore a strategy for spending less on PPC while maintaining traffic and sales.
All of SEOwhat cleints know how NOT so faund I am of PPC, we will do it, we will manage it but… we perfer Organic and see better results!
Identify Good Keywords
First, I do not recommend going cold turkey on PPC. Do not stop all PPC advertising and expect that your search engine optimization efforts are going to take over and maintain your current traffic and sales level. It takes time to transition to great organic search engine rankings. The first step is to identify the keywords and keyword phrases that are converting into actual sales.
In your web analytics package, look at the past several months’ of data. Analyzing the past year (or more) of data would be ideal. Start making a list of keyword phrases (perhaps your best 10 keyword phrases) that have the following criteria:
- Exact match. These are keywords that are set to “exact match” in your PPC campaign
- Good click thru ratio (CTR). Find the exact match keywords that have the best CTR and add them to the list.
- Convert into actual sales. There is no sense spending time to get organic search engine rankings for a keyword phrase that brings you traffic but not actual sales. By now you should have had conversion tracking set up in your web analytics. Go into your web analytics (such as Google Analytics), sort the data by keywords, and then sort it by the conversions. Keywords that convert at 100 percent are not necessarily good to focus on (unless you are getting a lot of 100 percent conversions). Keywords that are bringing in a significant amount of traffic and have a good conversion rate (5 percent or higher) may be better. Add them to the keyword list.
Identify Good Keywords
First, I do not recommend going cold turkey on PPC. Do not stop all PPC advertising and expect that your search engine optimization efforts are going to take over and maintain your current traffic and sales level. It takes time to transition to great organic search engine rankings. The first step is to identify the keywords and keyword phrases that are converting into actual sales.
In your web analytics package, look at the past several months’ of data. Analyzing the past year (or more) of data would be ideal. Start making a list of keyword phrases (perhaps your best 10 keyword phrases) that have the following criteria:
- Exact match. These are keywords that are set to “exact match” in your PPC campaign.
- Good click thru ratio (CTR). Find the exact match keywords that have the best CTR and add them to the list.
- Convert into actual sales. There is no sense spending time to get organic search engine rankings for a keyword phrase that brings you traffic but not actual sales. By now you should have had conversion tracking set up in your web analytics. Go into your web analytics (such as Google Analytics), sort the data by keywords, and then sort it by the conversions. Keywords that convert at 100 percent are not necessarily good to focus on (unless you are getting a lot of 100 percent conversions). Keywords that are bringing in a significant amount of traffic and have a good conversion rate (5 percent or higher) may be better. Add them to the keyword list.
SEO Social Web Article Package – Typically 400-600 words in length written from a third party perspective with the purpose of driving momentum on a keyword ranking and supporting SEO efforts for keyword positioning.
