Using PPC To Maximize Your Search Engine Positioning ROI
by: Dave
Davies
The quest for higher search
engine positioning on the natural search engines is generally the quest to
increase revenue from a product or service. It is not the rankings
themselves that hold any special value; it is the visitors that they bring
and the resulting increase in business. It is for this reason that the PPC
engines and namely the secondary ones are a great tool in developing a
campaign strategy for the natural engines that will produce the highest
return on investment.
While tools such as the
Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool and WordTracker are great tools for
helping to determine which phrases are most searched, they cannot provide
you with which phrases will produce the highest return on investment and
let's be honest, search engine positioning is not about traffic it's about
money. While traffic can often mean money, knowing which search phrases
are going to lead to the highest conversion rates will give you a great
advantage going into your SEO campaign.
While testing phrases on
the PPC engines will result in an increased timeframe for your search
engine positioning campaign, this step can result in much higher
conversions from the traffic you are going to get. For example, if you
were a business owner who was promoting a brand new acne treatment and you
were to simply look for the phrases with the highest numbers of searches
to target in the promotions for your site, you would undoubtedly settle on
the single keyword “acne” as your primary targeted phrase. Will this
produce the highest ROI? Unlikely and lets take a look at why:
Keyword phrase: acne
Searches: 2,470/day
estimated on WordTracker
Inbound links of #1 site:
2,642 on MSN
Number of pages of #1 site:
34,100
Approximate cost to
optimize site assuming it is new with 50+ pages: $7,000 - $10,000 with
guarantee.
Now, let's a take a look at
a less competitive phrase such as “acne treatment”:
Keyword phrase: acne
treatment
Searches: 516/day estimated
on WordTracker
Inbound links of #1 site:
216 on MSN
Number of pages of #1 site:
153
Approximate cost to
optimize site assuming it is new with 20+ pages: $3,000 - $5,000 with
guarantee.
Armed with this information
you would then want to test these two phrases on the PPC engines. Engines
such as Google and Overture provide great reporting tools that will enable
a website owner to actually track which phrases are converting for them,
however at $8.85/click on Overture to be #1 for “acne” or $2.90 to be #1
for “acne treatment”, that option may be just a bit out of your price
range. And so we have the secondary engines.
Pay-per-click engines such
as Enhance Interactive (formerly Ah-ha) make a great testing ground for
those choosing their keyword phrases. Ranking #1 for “acne” on Enhance can
be had for $0.15/click and “acne treatment” is only $0.23 to be #1.
Setting aside the money that could potentially be made from the PPC
engines themselves, with bids this low this engine and others like it make
great testing grounds for keyword selection.
To test your keyword
phrases simply bid to be #1 or at least in the top three for a potential
primary target phrase. Keep the site ranking for a couple weeks monitoring
your traffic and the sales of your product/service. After a couple weeks
remove the phrase from your list and switch it to an alternative phrase.
Again, monitor this success of this phrase for a couple weeks. After you
have tested all of your potential primary phrases you will be in a
position to assess which one will produce the highest return on
investment.
Selecting which phrase will
produce the highest ROI based on these numbers can be a bit more involved,
weighing a number of factors such as the cost in either time or money (or
both) to optimize for the various phrases, the sales-per-click ratio, etc.
Basically what you want to do is consider your budget vs. how much can you
make per click and thus, how many sales you can expect per day based on
the keyword phrase you have chosen to target. If a promotion can pay for
itself over a 3 to 6 month period of time, thus producing a surplus after
it is paid off, it can be considered a successful promotion.
It should be noted that
this step is not an exact science. The number of sales you will get per
day will be dependant on exactly what position you attain on the natural
engines (your content is also important obviously, however you will have
used your existing content on the PPC engines so for the most part you
will be comparing apples-to-apples). There will be some guestimation but
you will get a good idea of how many sales you would make if you ranked in
the same position for all of the possible phrases.
While I have not tested the
above noted phrases on the PPC engines and applied them to the natural
engines I would feel confident in predicting the ROI would be higher for
“acne treatment” based on two factors:
The competition is lower
and thus the number of sales required to produce a return on investment is
about half that of the phrase “acne”.
The phrase is far more
targeted. People searching for “acne” may be writing papers on the subject
or just looking for information whereas people searching for “acne
treatment” are far more likely to be looking for a solution to an acne
problem.
While I have my instinct on
the subject, were I to advise a client on the best possible strategy I
would have to recommend testing these phrase on the PPC engines. It may
extend the promotion for a bit but in the end the decision on which
keyword phrase makes the best target will be based far more on statistics
and facts than a simple guestimate.
Additional Considerations:
While this article's
purpose is to explain how PPC engines can be used to help increase the ROI
of a search engine positioning campaign, your use of the PPC engines
should not stop there. While you are testing out phrases you should be
making sales as well. If the revenue generated from the PPC promotion is
higher that it's cost then stick with it. PPC engines are a great testing
ground however they're also a great source of leads and revenue if used
correctly.
There are many PPC engines
out there. We've researched a number of them and posted the ones that have
produced the highest ROI for our clients on our PPC Engines page. These
are the engines that we have found are worth sticking with once any
testing phase is complete. In the case of the primary engines (Google and
Overture) you will have to use your discretion based on the cost-per-click
to determine whether they are worth testing or advertising on.
By Dave Davies, Beanstalk
Search Engine Positioning, Inc.
Dave Davies is the CEO of
Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. He has been optimizing and
ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success.
Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your
website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search
engines.
by-beanstalk-inc.com |
