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

Google+, waste of time or real contender?

In the last few days, Google launched its latest attempt to conquer the social media world (Google gets social again with Google+ | Mobile Apps | ZDNet UK) with Google +

Call me cynical, but to me this new effort is very likely to achieve as much as Buzz and Wave did.....not much!

While I don't blame Google for the actual willingness to crack this market, I'd be happier if they focused fully on their core business: search

When figures start to show that Facebook is reaching saturation points in certain markets, is now a good time to try and launch a competing service, albeit a little more advanced in terms of communication?

As usual, only time will tell if this is going to succeed, but I wouldn't bet money on it.

What's your view?

Google Instant Pages, why?

Ok, this is going to sound like a rant, but as I'm an opinionated french man, I'm going for it.

So this week Google launched Instant Pages, a clever system that predicts which search result you're going to like and pre loads it for your in the background, thus reducing time to view the page.
While I do appreciate the fact that Google is always trying to enhance the searchers experience, I'm still wondering why people there probably spent hours/days/months developing something that has extremely little value in my eyes.
I watched the intro video for this new tool this week and greatly entertained @rochelledancel when I said "if you can't wait 3.8 seconds for your page to load, get off the web!". Well I stand by this and ask the question: why do we need Instant Pages? Internet speed is increasing everyday and most web users will be able to view a page within a matter of seconds depending on their connection, with sometimes background scripts and tags taking a little longer to run (but not affecting the viewing experience). So the only place where this could be useful is in countries where people still use dial up connections....
Surely you would think Google has bigger fish to fry at the moment in its quest for world domination: How to integrate more relevance in searches, how to crack the social media world, latent semantic indexing.....

But hey, this is just my opinion, so rant over!
As usual, I'd be glad to hear your views on this, so feel free to share.