I’ve seen a lot of people posting on different forums that either PPC does not work or that it does not work as well as organic results. I have to wonder how much these people know about setting up a page for PPC.
Paid Per Click works as well or better than organic results if it is done correctly but then there are very few people that understand how to do them correctly and this is the reason so many people say organic is better.
With Google AdWords I’m able to build a site for my visitors. If I want to use pictures, graphics or anything else to help convert that visitor into a customer, it does not matter. The site is 100% for the visitor and has nothing to so with the search engines.
Everything I do is about improving conversion rates and this starts with the keywords I choose. If I’m selling 18kt gold earrings then I do not want to bid on keywords like; jewelery, gold, earrings, rings, neck lesses or anything else that does not describe my product perfectly. The idea is to convert every single person that lands on that page. My keywords could be things like;
18kt gold earrings
Custom 18kt gold earrings
earring 18kt gold
and the list can go on and on describing my earrings to the point that any visitor that lands on that page will get exactly what he wants. Also the more exact my keywords the less the competition and the less I have to pay for each click.
Once I get my list of keywords together I need to create a page for each of the keywords and create those pages for converting visitors.
If my keyword is going to be 18kt gold rabbit earrings then the page they land on should have pictures of the 18kt gold rabbit earrings, the first line of text should say 18kt gold rabbit earrings, we should have text that tells them what’s in it for them and a call to action that guides them in the direction we want them to go.
The conversion is effected by the navigation, motivation, and trustworthiness of the landing page.
Now that we have the pages set up we need to add our keywords into AdWords.
AdWords comes with broad match set as it’s default setting. This means that if my keywords are 18kt gold earrings my keywords will show for anything with 18kt gold earrings. Examples; 18kt earrings gold, Zales gold earrings and 18kt rings, Colombian 18kt gold and silver earrings. While you may rank for keywords you did not think of you will also rank for a lot of keywords you did not want to.
The AdWords also come with the default setting that allows you to rank for things you’ve never thought of. Let’s say my keyword is 18kt Colombian Gold Earrings, this default setting allows me to rank for 14kt Colombian Gold, Colombian Jewelery, Colombian silver and many others. The advantages are that I rank for keywords I never thought of the disadvantage is that I rank for keywords I never wanted to.
By Placing square brackets around my keywords I change this setting. [Colombian 18kt gold earrings] now I will only rank for that keyword when it is typed in exactly that way.
There is a lot more to the AdWords then this but I only wanted to make a point that the AdWords do work better or as well as the organic searches, if they are set up correctly and that there is a lot more to setting them up then just throwing some keywords together and starting to bid on Google. When someone says that they have tested and tried them and that the organic searches did better I have to wonder if they set them up correctly.
I’m not saying not to do SEO but don’t leave out the PPC.