Make Search Engine Marketing Work
August 15th, 2008People ask me which search engine marketing strategy they should concentrate on, free or paid. I tell them it’s like a sandwich: it just doesn’t work with only one slice of bread!
To get the most traffic, sales and best ROI combine the power of both organic (free) and pay-per-click search marketing. Together, they’ll help you reach your goals of more traffic and sales on your website in both the short AND long term.
Use both search engine strategies in tandem so they build off of each other.
Step 1. Do your keyword research and then build a content-rich web site around keywords your target market is searching on.
Step 2. Now pile on some pay-per-click advertising, with each ad built on a single keyword. Use PPC to bring more visitors to your site and measure your sales per visitor, called your sales conversion rate. Your PPC campaign will quickly show you which keywords bring in the most visitors, which result in the most sales and which ones are duds.
Step 3. Take the best-performing keywords from your PPC campaigns and tweak your site with them. By emphasizing them in your content and code, you’ll start ranking well for those keywords in the organic listings (the regular listings that come up when someone uses a search engine).
You can build landing pages when you find a group of top-performing keywords that are related. Build a page that contains specific information that relates to that group of keywords that would appeal to searchers who are using those keywords.
Pay-per-click will bring first time visitors to your site for the answers to their search questions. By finding out what works in PPC, you can adjust the keywords on your site to get a higher search engine ranking; over time this will build up your free traffic.
And here’s a bonus! If you can get both your PPC ads and your organic listings on the same page of the search results, you’ll have a search engine marketing strategy that’s far greater than the sum of its parts.
SEO and PPC, with a delicious keyword filling it’s a search sandwich!