PPC Campaigns - Is Your Website ‘SEO Ready’?

• Attempting PPC Advertising Is Not For Amateurs •
• Don’t Leap & Look Later! •

I’ve recently become involved with a number of new clients who have been attempting Google PPC campaigns to attract more traffic to their sites, but have absolutely no idea about what really needs to be put in place before a PPC campaign should be attempted. Why, they don’t even have a clue about issues such as how Google determines the ‘click’ prices. This is like jumping into deep water, but not knowing how to swim. Bad idea, you know?

However, in defense of my clients, there are thousands (probably more like hundreds of thousands) of people doing the same thing … people who are eager to have more targeted traffic come to their sites in the hope of selling more of their products or services. I understand this. I am not trying to put shame on anyone.

Some Facts You Need To Be Aware Of Before You Even Utter The Term ‘PPC’

Are you aware you will pay MORE, yes I said MORE for each click your PPC ad receives if you are not well versed in PPC advertising basics. Here are just a few of a myriad of issues that affect the cost per click. Believe me, the Google bots take all on-page factors and even your ads into consideration before they figure out what you’ll be charged for each PPC click.

• You should have a unique landing page.  Simply explained, that is a page you have written and optimized specifically for the ad. It should provide everything and more that the person who clikced on your ad would hope to find.
• You need to do detailed keyword research  in order to understand what keyword phrases people are really typing into the search engines to try and find your product or services. What you may think searchers are typing into the search box often is not even remotely close to reality.
• You need to know keyword trends.  That’s right! Believe it or not, depending upon your marketing niche, keyword phrases that searchers are using can change from month to month, as but one example. If you don’t know the search trends, you may be missing out on a broader base of people who are searching for what you have to offer.

  Or worse yet … you may be bidding on terms that are very competivie, thusly will have higher cost per click prices, yet you might be better off going for terms that have less competition and will COST YOU LESS.

• The quality of your SEO efforts in writing your ads will also be taken into consideration. Proper keyword use is also very essential for the relevancy of what the prospect is looking for.

You also need to know about “LSI” - latent semantic indexing. LSI allows Google to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text. Here’s a good article (that isn’t overwhelmingly technical) that covers the basics for those of you interested: Google Semantically Related Words & Latent Semantic Indexing Technology I recommend you become very familiar with LSI if you are going to manage your PPC campaign yourself.

The bottom line here is this: PPC advertising is NOT for amateurs.  You need to either do a lot of homework to educate yourself on the ins and outs of being successful so as not to pay more for each click than you need to … or hire a professional PPC campaign manager.