Why use SEO & PPC for your business

The SEO vs PPC debate has been going on for many years, but in today's increasingly competitive online environment it has no reason to exist anymore.

A lot of businesses still seem to be confused as to what the benefits are to using different marketing channels, especially when it comes to search marketing. So in order for you to invest your marketing dollars (or pounds, euros...) in the correct areas, here's a quick overview of why you should consider using SEO and PPC (paid search ads) for best results.

Paid search - getting it right

With paid bids reaching $54 in some industries this week (http://searchengineland.com/study-insurance-loan-related-keywords-are-googles-cash-cows-86113), it is becoming increasingly difficult for new or small businesses to commit to paid search.

So when is the right time to consider paid search? how should you go about it? which keywords should you target?
Here are some answers to help you make the right decision:

What are your objectives?
As for everything else in a business, you need to have clear objectives when considering paid search. These can be conversion objectives, specific revenue targets, number of subscribers.
Working towards those will help you focus your activities and judge return on investment, a crucial element of paid search.

Organic search vs paid search
Ideally you will a apply a mix of both organic and paid search as these two disciplines work hand in hand and support each other. A search started organically may end up converting on a paid keyword and vice versa.
The best advice here if you're just starting your business is to get all the basics of onsite and offsite seo right, and while doing so start your paid campaign to generate some traffic. After a few months, your organic traffic will pick up allowing you to modify the paid/organic balance based on results.

Budgets & keywords
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, some paid keywords are now reaching $54 per click, but don't let this frighten you. If you don't have big budgets, there are ways to run some campaigns at an affordable rate. To limit budgets, bid on your brand terms. These will be your cheapest keywords, but as your brand gets known, they should end up giving you decent traffic and hopefully conversions.
Generic keywords are always more expensive, so try and identify long tail keywords that your users will search for. These may not generate a lot of searches or traffic but should give good ROI.

Use your analytics
Using your web analytics data should give you a very good insight into your users behaviour. Analyse keyword reports and conversions to refine your paid campaigns and give them more focus. Google Analytics is constantly evolving and will provide you with more than enough information to control your campaigns and budgets.

So in short, the ideal time to start using paid search is as early as possible after your business is created. While not compulsory, it should be integrated into your online marketing strategy as it is still a very cost effective channel despite recent increases in costs.

I hope this answers some questions or worries you may have as a business, but as usual feel free to share your views and opinions.

Related posts:

• Improve your seo via paid search
• Getting started in PPC

Improve your SEO via paid search

Very good article on how looking at your paid search data can help you refine your organic seo - How PPC Can Improve Organic Search Conversions.

Paid search + organic optimisation = better results

While the article focuses mostly on conversions and how paid search results can help you drive your organic optimisation, it is important to remember another point: paid and organic search work hand in hand.

If you keywords produce results both on the organic and paid side, then customer confidence will be increased and the likelihood of them clicking through to your site will be greater.

Click path matters

Very often searchers will follow a path when looking for something, and this path will involve clicks on paid ads and organic results. if your keywords are present on the 2 channels, your CTR should increase along with your conversion levels if your landing pages are optimised.

The right balance

What's important is to find the right balance in your SEO strategy. I'd always recommend to work on your onsite SEO as well as developing paid search campaigns to maximise performance. And as the article shows, you can then take the learnings from your paid campaigns and apply them to your overall SEO strategy (and vice versa)

Search marketing management - which tools to use

Across my years in the online marketing and SEO/PPC industry, I've moved from a very hands-on approach to more strategic roles involving a lot of agency management.
I've now reached a point in my career where I need to assess and recommend agencies for specific projects, and search marketing is an area where choosing an agency can very often decide the fate of a business because of its impact on revenue and ultimately profits.

With so many agencies competing in the same space, you need to have clear objectives and budgets before even starting your search. Get as many quotes as necessary to get good points of comparison, and don't forget to ask for references.

I've recently been introduced to a company called SearchIgnite (SI), and I have to say that I've so far been more than impressed by the solution they are offering. At its core, SI is a paid search bid management & optimisation platform, but it also offer multi channel tracking (paid,organic, social media...)as well as a very advanced forecasting tool.

• Paid search forecasting

This tool is the one I'm the one I'm most interested in as after an initial running period of 3 to 4 weeks, search marketers can accurately start forecasting paid results based on variables such as budgets, CPA, expected conversions or actions....To put it simply, if you'd like to know how a 10% increase in your paid budget is going to affect your signups or sales, you just have to enter the data into the tool to get a prediction. This provides answers that even finance directors or board members cannot contest when looking at your paid budgets, and it also gives you more flexibility in planning.

• Click path analysis vs last click wins

Another great feature is the click path analysis. A lot of paid search management tools work on a last click wins basis (where the action following a click on a paid ad is attributed the search leading to that click). While there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this model, it does however mean that you're not getting the full story on what your visitors have done or searched for prior to that last click. For example, a visitor could have started his research with a very generic keyword, then moved on to a more specific search (long tail) and finally converted on a brand term. If you take the last click wins model, then you'll probably invest more budget on brand terms, but by doing so you may be missing out on all the visitors who did a search for generic keywords.
Click path analysis allows you to find out exactly the path researchers have taken before converting, whether it is organic or paid, allowing you to pinpoint areas in which to invest your spend.

• Bid management

This is what all paid search management tools will do and it can be done manually or fully automated, depending on your requirements. From my point of view, I'm quite happy to let paid search experts manage this part of the process as it is really time consuming . But whatever the solution you use, make sure the settings are right for your business.

As I'm about to get my hands on the SearchIgnite platform in the next few days, I'll let you know how I get on. In the meantime, feel free to let me know which search management tools you use and what you like about them.

How to deal with paid budget cuts

I've just realised that it's already been a month since my last post, I definitely need to make a better job of writing...but with xmas coming, not sure how this is gonna go...oh well, there are always new year's resolutions.

Alright, today's post is going to be about something that most marketers dealing with paid search campaigns will know, especially during a recession; budget cuts.
As you probably already know if you're running ppc campaigns with Google Adwords, Yahoo search marketing or Bing, changes in any elements of the campaigns can have a very big impact on results, so here are a few tips to make your reduced budgets go further:

• Whatever you do, do not pause your campaigns - Google especially likes consistency, so it is always best to avoid stopping campaigns as it could take you months to rebuild history and raise your quality score again. Even running a very minimal budget is better than stopping everything.
• Bid on brand terms - although many people may question the fact of bidding on your own name, results are very often showing that brand terms /keywords are some of the bets performing ones. And they are cheap, especially if you've trademarked your name, so go ahead and use your name. This will also help you display results in both paid and organic rankings for the same search, increasing customer confidence.
• Focus on top converting keywords - This is a bit of an obvious one, but if you lack budget, make sure you bid on keywords that have converted for you in the past (conversions being sales, sign ups or whatever other metric you use for performance).
• Look at visitors click path if available - I know this is not really easy to get, but if you can, find out which keywords your users have searched during their research. The keyword they converted from may not be the one they searched for the initial phase of their product research. Visitors may initially use a very generic keyword and as they learn about what they really want, they will tend to use more specific, long tail keywords. Knowing the click path will help you bid for these all important initial search terms.
• Optimise your landing pages - Again this should be standard practice, but make sure your campaigns are as optimised as possible, from keywords, to creatives to landing pages. The more relevant the search keyword is to your creative and your landing page, the higher your quality score will be. This in turn will have an impact on your ads rankings.
• Look at your competitors - look at what your competitors are bidding on and if need be, bid on their brand terms. Remember that you cannot use your competitors' brand in your creatives if they are trademarked, but nothing stops you from displaying a creative by bidding on their search terms.
• Use common sense - as in everything SEO related, use common sense when managing your paid campaigns, and as the market recovers, so will your budgets.

Enjoy your Sunday

Bing...and the Google is gone!

Where have I heard a similar phrase before...ah yes, Barry Scott!
In the light of the Microsoft/Yahoo agreement this week, I thought I'd take some time to talk about Bing, Microsoft's "decision engine", and the implications of the agreement for SEO.

From what I can see, it looks like Bing is now going to power Yahoo's search results, and to be honest, I'm far from convinced this is a good thing for the seo industry.
I've been working in SEO and online marketing for a number of years now, and MSN/Live/Bing has always been the most unpredictable search engine. I dont know if it's because of the companies I worked for, but I've always struggled to achieve decent rankings in MSN's SERPs for my core keywords even though the same keywords were delivering great results in Google and Yahoo.
Now that I've had a bit of time to look at Bing. it still looks to me like the results are based on the old Live algorithm and do not give me what I expect to find, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one to feel that way. So excuse me Mr Microsoft, but I need more than a slick looking interface to convince me (yes, Bing does look very nice and clean, shall we just call it Bling then??).
On the plus side, Bing offers some webmaster and keyword tools (thanks Rochelle for the post suggestion!) and until I test them further I'll reserve judgement. One can only hope they'll be as good as Google Webmaster tools....but very unlikely. Maybe they'll help SEOs understand how the algorithm works, but I'm still worried that the transition from Yahoo to Bing is going to hurt a lot of websites in terms of organic traffic.
It'll also be interesting to look at paid results as a lot of advertisers (including me) have already heard the rumours that click through rates in Bing are higher than in Google (less ads displayed)

If I were Google, I wouldn't be really worried about this new alliance yet, and as an online marketer, I'll still focus most of my efforts on Google while keeping an eye on what's going on on the other side, but until I can see some tangible results for my sites in Bing results, I'll remain unconvinced.

Getting started in PPC - Make the most of your paid campaigns

Ok, atfer a few weeks talking only about social media, I thought it was time for a change...so today we're going back to one of best online marketing channels in terms of ROI: Paid search.
There's very often a debate as to whether companies should focus on organic or paid search...and the answer is that to make the most of your marketing efforts, you should use both.
Paid and organic channels complement each other and in the long term can bring you a regular amount of leads and business.

So how do you get started if you've never been into the paid search world before? here are some simple tips that should put you on the right track:

1. Before attempting to launch paid campaigns, make sure you have clear and measurable objectives for you site: sign ups, sales, document requests....
   Remember that paid campaigns are all about return on investment, so measuring /reporting is crucial.
   
2. Optimise the conversion channel/ sales funnel on your site: the 3 clicks rule applies here - visitors should be able to get to the content they want in 3 clicks, so make sure that your site is clear and directs visitors in the right direction
3. Look at what your competitors are doing and benchmark your business against theirs. If their ideas work, why not take inspiration from them (I did not say copy, ok!?)
4. Do some keyword research to identify core keywords and long tail keywords for your target market
5. Choose which paid programme you want to go for. I guess at this point everybody's thinking Google Adwords, and there's a reason for that. The google tool is the most comprehensive out there a will give you the widest coverage. However, it is also worth looking at Yahoo Search marketing and MSN/Bing.
6. Allocate a budget to your campaigns and stick to it.
   
7. Build your campaigns within Google making sure to have a wide range of keywords, creatives and landing pages. There is no magic formula to get it right so getting your hands dirty and testing is vital. Always give some time for your campaigns to run before making changes.
8. Optimise your landing pages - build ppc specific landing pages on your site using the same keywords as your creatives and clear calls to action. Google uses a quality score for landing pages so consistency in messaging and optimisation matters.
9. Track, measure and report on your campaigns. Review results on a regular basis and updates campaigns accordingly. Bidding high on keywords is not always the best strategy, so you need to aim for high click through rates (CTR) and low cost per acquisition (CPA)
10. Make sure you website is organically optimised too and is ranked for your core keywords, as a presence in both paid and organic results will boost customers confidence.

Paid search can take a lot of resources from a business so make sure that you plan accordingly, and if you have a sufficient budget, going with a reputable search marketing agency to manage your campaigns is always a good option.

As always, if you need help planning your online marketing activities, let me know!
Have a great weekend