Pay Per Click vs. Natural Positioning

Pay Per Click Advertising and You

Pay Per Click marketing campaigns are often viewed separately from a natural SEO campaign.  Many times, those who create and spend their marketing budget on a Pay Per Click campaign do not even consider starting a natural SEO campaign, and vice versa.  Many of those new to internet marketing consider the two to be mutually exclusive, when in fact they should be considered to be mutually inclusive.

A graphical way of thinking about it would be two arcing lines that are running simultaneously.  The first line runs this way (\) and represents the Pay Per Click Marketing.  As you can see, you should start high and gradually fade out the Pay Per Click over many months time as the marketing goes on.  Simultaneously, the natural SEO campaign is represented by an arcing line like so (/).  It starts slowly but as the months go on the positioning in the major search engines improves and the marketing budget should be moved over to the natural SEO as the Pay Per Click fades out.

Using Pay Per Click to Test Keywords

Pay Per Click offers a very powerful tool for testing which keywords are the best performers for your particular site.  A site that starts with a strong Pay Per Click budget can gather data on conversions (those keywords that convert to sales).  This is the most important data you can collect for your website.  It provides the information you need to create a successful natural SEO campaign from the get-go.

Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter, and Yahoo Panama are the three top Pay Per Click programs to choose from.  Most companies with a small budget opt to use the Google AdWords campaign exclusively.  Those companies with larger budgets utilize all three search engines for maximum exposure.

One major tip when creating a Pay Per Click campaign is to avoid Google’s broad match option.  Many users of Pay Per Click are not aware that the keywords and keyword phrases are set to “broad match” by default. 

For example, your website sells women’s shoes.  You start a pay-per-click campaign where you use a keyword phrase such as “stylish women’s shoes.”  Google considers any combination of the words in that phrase as a successful keyword match.  Google could theoretically show your ad when someone searches for “stylish shoes”.  Obviously this has the possibility of bringing the wrong market (men or kids) to your website, and would thus be a wasted click.

The easiest way to make your keyword phrase a “direct match” keyword would be to add brackets around the phrase, like so: [stylish women’s shoes].  This way, Google will only show your ad to those that include all 3 words in their search.

Finding these best-performing keywords should always be the top priority of any marketer, and utilizing them will help increase conversions with the right target market, thus increasing sales.