The more time spent focusing on Internet marketing, the more commonality I find between different marketing disciplines. Take pay-per-click advertising for example. PPC can be one of the most powerful tools you use to improve the effectiveness of your search engine optimization campaigns.
Collecting information from your PPC marketing can prove incredibly valuable to your search engine optimization. As you already know, pay-per-click marketing can give you a tremendous amount of information in a very short period of time. What’s even better is that this information can help to direct other marketing campaigns including search engine optimization.
One of the most effective ways to use PPC is to drive qualified traffic to your website. Essentially, the way that pay-per-click works is that targeted keywords trigger an ad to appear. When the ad is displayed, users click-through to a landing page or website. These qualified visitors are the one’s you want. With a little investigation and knowledge of the specific keywords that generate conversions, you can better focus your efforts for finding and attracting the right visitors to your website.
The concept that I teach in SEO training is the most effective way to combine pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization is to focus on conversions. What keywords have you promoted through pay per click advertising that led to conversions? If you’ve been running PPC for a while and you are still unsure, then consider expanding your analytic capabilities to include Google conversion tracking.
Once you have the answer and know which terms produce the greatest conversions, regardless of ad variation, then you SEO keywords have been determined. You want to generate organic traffic to the same keywords you’re promoting through PPC as long as they are generating your highest conversions.
An example of this might be someone promoting an ebook on how to fix a car. If the highest converting keyword is, car repair, then you should consider car repair as a keyword phrase you must optimize for. Organic traffic to this term will produce targeted web site visitors and conversions for little or no money as you improve your rankings.
The last piece is to take your highest converting landing pages and build in some or all of the elements into your website. Once you’ve tracking and optimized landing pages via PPC, you can duplicate what you’ve learned from a conversion perspective organically. Consider applying the landing page elements that have generated the highest return for you on your pay-per-click advertising.
Use what you’ve learning through PPC advertising to truly target your search engine optimization campaigns. By doing so, you can improve the quality of traffic you’re attracting to your site and reduce your pay per click costs. Don’t waste time optimizing your site for terms that no one is searching on or that never lead to conversion.