Always Monitor Your PPC Campaign

Monitoring your PPC campaign is vital. Your PPC campaign is never finished. You can not just set up your PPC campaign and walk away. PPC campaign should be monitored regularly. Ads positions do change each day. Apart from ads positions monitoring, you should always track the effectiveness of your PPC keywords and phrases each month.

So checking click through rates and analyzing visitors behaviors can bring you valuable insights and increase the effectiveness of your PPC campaign. Analyzing and monitoring activities should have to be ongoing. You can’t say I’ll check up how my ads are doing next month. That should e your daily task.

Your rankings in search engines can change rapidly during the week. So you have to check your PPC campaign each day.

After you have chosen keywords IN PPC, the next step is creating PPC ads. Creating PPC ads is not a difficult task. Nobody is using the same technique for creating PPC ads. You can read basic instruction on PPC ads creation in your PPC program.

Creating Great PPC Ads

But creating great ad is not that simple. Great PPC ads require a lot of work. Sometimes the simple ad for your PPC campaign might just work, but if you want to get the maximum out of your PPC, you should create great ads and descriptions that quickly catch the attention of your visitors.

When you are creating your search engine description, your goal is to get as much traffic to your site as possible. And convert that traffic into sales.

You don’t want to pay for useless traffic like for example window shoppers that will just dwell on your site and do nothing. You need to attract the ones that are ready to buy, hire your services, or signup your newsletter.

That is why your PPC ads should describe exactly what you are offering. At the same time high quality marketing copy services should be used to make sure your ads are good enough to get you the most out of your PPC campaign.

PPC Ads And Relevancy

Relevancy is important element when copywriting your PPC ads. Search engines also require that your ads are relevant to what you sale. So when you are including keywords in the title and description of your ads, you are increasing your click through rate and at the same time get higher positions in SERPs.

When writing perfect PPC ads, the right formula should be used for creating good ads. That gets you through search engine editors and your ads are displayed in front of potential buyers. Here are some tips on how to create good PPC ads:

Use the right keywords: When you are including keywords in your PPC ads, your ads will appear in conjunction with related topics, and getting traffic.

Qualifying PPC Traffic

Always qualify your traffic: Creating PPC ads that people will click on is not enough. You have to create ads that the right people will click. Not all the traffic is same effective. Even if visitors search with the same keywords, they might have different needs. When writing PPC ads you should attract only target audience, while telling everyone else that your business will not be able to offer them what they want.

List features and benefits in ad descriptions: Usually you have very little space in your PPC ad description. That’s why you should include at least one feature and benefit for the product or services you are offering.

Call to action: Marketing studies have proven that including a call to action in your PPC ads will increase your conversion rates (sales). So you should include call to action in your PPC ads description. Ads without call to action perform less effectively.

PPC Ads that stand out: Usually there is a lot of competition between PPC advertisers, so making your PPC ad stand out, can bring you higher sales. Usually PPC advertisers have very similar ads so yours have to stand out.

Choosing Effective Keywords

When you are trying to select the best keywords you might run into problems. It is possible that your keywords that you have selected are not the optimal ones and are not bringing you enough traffic.

Sometimes keywords that work for a while stop working. That’s why it is really important to always develop the right keyword selection strategy and test the new keywords all the time.

Selecting the optimal keywords that will bring you the most visitors, improve your conversion rate, and make your site visible in search engines might be a difficult task.

You must not give up, it takes time to proper test all the keywords.

First of all you have to make a keyword list. Put down your suggestion, and also ask your costumers what keywords they would use to find your site or services.

You might just start using all the keywords that are suggested by keyword suggestion tools. And you can use thesaurus to get additional keywords that you didn’t consider.

Get enough keywords to cover all your services and avoid using very generic keywords that are used on almost every site that is even remotely related to yours. These keywords are incredibly hard to rank and that is the reason you should avoid using them. Instead use the keywords that are relevant but not used on many competitors’ sites.

When you start with your keyword list write down all the keywords that you think of. Don’t think for now about keyword quality. Many people will think that is it so easy to select keywords for your PPC campaign.

This first keyword selection step might be easy, but it gets much harder when you research and qualify words and phrases, then use them in PPC campaign.

Your keyword list will not stay the same. Each time you add content, change your site or something changes in the field your site is in, you have to update your keyword list and test again. Keyword testing is an ongoing process.

Your competitors are constantly revising and monitoring their keywords and PPC strategies.

Keywords are what draw potential customers to your web site. These possible costumers are already ready to buy, or they might be just the potential costumers that you can motivate into making a purchase or reaching a conversion.

When you’re creating your keyword lists, it’s important to know that some keywords will not bring you high quality visitors but will actually decrease your rankings or get your site removed from search listings.

These keywords are called forbidden search terms or poison keywords. These words will decrease your pages’ rankings if a search engine bot spot them in your site’s title, description or URL. These words can either decrease or demolish your pages in ranking.

There is no official list with these words, but as a rule all the curse and vulgar words are included. When you use these words in your site with the goal of improving your rankings, your site might get delisted or buried from search results.

Two types of words are known to cause problems for your site, if you are using them in your PPC campaign:

Vulgar words

Politically incorrect words (they cause especially big problems in countries like North Korea and China, where many internet sites are simply censored).

So the list of these words does not exist because it includes too many words. Many words can be excluded or even flagged by a search engine because those words are associated with search engine spam.

When it becomes clear that a word is used specifically to rank higher, even if it is included on a page full of unrelated links or content, search engines will examine the relationship of this word or phrase with other words on a page before search engine will decide how to rank that page.

So as soon as search engines crack down on a word or phrase, another one pops up to take over. Some people are confusing poison words with keyword poison.

Keyword poison is a special term used to describe overuse of keywords on the page. When you are putting the page together you must use your keywords only as often as it is really necessary, and not more than that. If you are inserting keywords randomly into page, you are risking your site getting lower rankings then usual, in worse case, your site might be excluded from search engine index and marked as spam.

There is another group of words beside poison words called stop words. Stop words are words that are so common on the Web that they are in most cases ignored by search engines and are completely useless in your PPC campaign.

Here is a list of stop words:

For example the search term “the night lamp” is a clear example how search engines ignores the stop word the. So basically they see only “night lamp” without “the”. So that means common words, called stop words, are ignored when searches are performed.

When you have put together your keyword list, and narrowed it down, you have to focus on budget that will be spent for that PPC program.

One way to find out how much will you get for a set budget is to forecast search volumes. It means that a company can control its marketing expenditures by predicting the performance of your selected keywords and desired positions of those keywords. So company can find out the amount in sales for every amount that is invested.

You should also decide what rank will be the best for your PPC campaign. No.1 spot is the most expansive and usually not the best choice.

You will have to balance your keyword costs (visitor clicks) with thecost per acquisition (CPA).

So if it costs $3 to have your link in first slot you will get 33.3 clicks for $100. So settling with third position might cost you only $2 but you get 50 clicks for $100.

On the other hand if your ranking position goes down, also the number of visitors decreases. On average there is approx. 20 % difference between first and second ranking slots in SERPs.

So it means higher you rank, more traffic you will receive. So working with lower budget might be better to focus on lower spots in SERP. On the other hand if you have an unlimited budget, you should target the no.1 position that is also the most expensive one.

You have to ask yourself if ranking higher means more goal conversions. If not spending extra money from your budget is probably a waste of money.

Let me explain this in more details. If you are paying $3 per click for no.1 slot in rankings and you get 33.3 clicks for $100, but only 1 percent of those visitors purchase something from your site, your conversion rate is bad.

But if you focus on no.3 spot that costs $2 you get 50 clicks for $100, the conversion is better.

You can also focus on more specific keywords that are not so popular and cost for example only $1. In that case you get 100 clicks for $100 and the conversion rate is even bigger.

So you are doing better with no. 3 spot than no.1 spot.

For start make a 100-200 keyword / phrases list. Use various broad and specific keywords / phrases. Use keywords suggestion tool like Google Adwords to determine the click volume and cost per click for each of those keywords or phrases.

You can then easily estimate search volumes and the cost of those search volumes. Also you should focus on other metrics that will help you find out the real value and cost of keywords from your list.

Those additional metrics are:

Projected Impressions

Clicks per Month

Average Cost per Click (CPC)

Budget Requirements

Additional metrics will help you increasing your budget’s effectiveness that you invest in your PPC program.

Keywords with lower cost per click are less popular and are usually less expensive then the popular keywords. Use some of these keywords to increase your goal conversions, because you are investing smaller amount of budget for the same number of clicks. And specific keywords are usually more efficient for creating goal conversions.

You have to understand that all information from keyword suggestion tools are based on historical data. So there might be changes in CPC, CTR, clicks per month for each season, month.

Important elements that affect performance results are also sales, competition and landing pages.

This is just another reason you should always test and retest your PPC campaign and make it more efficient.

Keyword testing is the process where you examine keywords and how many searches they’re included in, as well as what the competition for those keywords / phrases is. Once you’ve finished that research, you start to use your keywords on your site very slowly, monitoring your sites traffic and goal conversions after each new keyword is added to the site.

Even if it’s time consuming, keyword testing has the potential to improve your PPC program results if you do it properly. When you are doing the research you are finding out what your most effective keywords are; then you can use those keywords to improve your rankings and impressions.

Before you start you should know what you are testing for. You should ask yourself if you are testing to see the effectiveness of your recent ad copy, or do you want to know how the landing pages are attracting and keeping your visitors.

If you are experiencing a lot of bounces on your landing pages, you may need to make your landing pages stickier. Another question might be are visitors reaching goal conversions or does your ad placement really make a difference?

After all that research, creating and narrowing of your keywords, you can finally finalize your keyword list. It is time to use these keywords in your PPC program. You are ready to earn money. Finalizing your keywords list doesn’t mean that that list is final. As I said before the testing is an ongoing process, so new keywords can be added, old keywords might be removed etc.

The Long Tail Search

Long Tail of Search is a popular phrase that defines 3 – 5 word phrases that site visitors are using when trying to find appropriate site. Long Tail of Search are actually non competitive keywords and phrases that are more specific as usual 2 word phrases. They more precisely describe your product or service.

The concept of the Long Tail of Search means that average internet user begins any search with a very broad term or keyword. For example, if he is using American spa, that term is broad enough to return far too many results to be useful.

So using the Long Tail theory, that are more precise and less common keywords and phrases, is usually the most effective.

Usually an average product site gets traffic by several types of keywords and phrases:

Product names and brands

General keywords and phrases

Long-tail keywords and phrases

You don’t know how effective is each Long Tail keyword until you have optimized your site and have some content on your site to attract it. There will be some Long Tail queries in your server logs, but there could be much more searches.

To properly use the magnificent effectiveness of Long Tail of Search, you need to create a lot of rich content.

To capture the Long Tail, you need to create content that not only is relevant to your product or service that you are selling on your site, but is also related to your product or service, even if the relationship is remote.

You should do this because you have to attract not only people who know about you and your product, or who know just what they need, but you need to attract people who have the same problems as your target audience and who are looking for a solution.

Here are some tips on how to make your keyword list most effective:

Delete all non related keywords from your list. An unrelated keyword is a keyword, that doesn’t apply to your site in any way. If you have keywords on your list and no content for them, you can either create new content and use those keywords in the content, or delete those keywords from your list.

Remove the keywords that have too much competition. Only if you have an unlimited budget you can keep them. Otherwise discard those keywords from your list.

Remove all the keywords that your potential visitors will most likely never use or overlook. In most cases you can tell types of keywords your potential costumers will use when searching for your site, service, or product.

Also remove all the industry buzzwords that someone outside of the industry might never use. Placing these keywords in the right place in your PPC campaign will be one step closer to your ultimate successful PPC program.

Keyword research is one of the most important elements of any SEO or PPC campaign.

You should carefully choose the most effective keywords, because these keywords will be a vital part of your website , your PPC campaign and many other campaigns.

Select your keywords from your own knowledge of the product or service that you’re marketing. You should be able to select few keywords that characterize your products or services. If you can’t select at least 1 keyword, try to get to know your product or services better.

What keywords would your costumer use to find your product or services? Your costumers will tell you what keywords they think of or use when they are trying to find your product or services. Customers can always give you honest an accurate feedback about keywords.

Check what keywords your competition is using. Carefully observe your competitors’ websites for additional keywords you might use. If they are using these keywords there must be some people using them. Check which keywords have the highest density on the competitors’ pages. These are the keywords you should most probably focus on.

Keyword suggestion tool is a vital element of any SEO or PPC campaign. It helps you find additional keywords that you would normally miss. Keyword suggestion tool is giving you a list of keywords based on a keyword that you type into search tool.

Keyword suggestion tools also give you more info about the popularity of each keyword. Few years ago popularity of keywords was measured by typing each keyword in search engine and finding out how many results turned up. Today keyword suggestion tools help you find the popularity much faster.

Here’s how keyword suggestion tool works: first, you put your proposed keywords into a keyword suggestion tool, and keywords suggestion tool checks it’s database that contains millions of instances of keyword usage. With the help of keyword suggestion tool you can quickly find out how many users are conducting daily searches for that keyword, how many of those searches resulted in an actual visit, and what related search terms were used.

There are many different keyword suggestion tools available on the net. But the most popular are:

• Overture Keyword Selector Tool: Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool shows you number of searches conducted over a given month for a keyword or phrase related to the search term you entered into the keyword selection tool. Overture Keyword Selector Tool can be found here: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

• Wordtracker Keyword Selector Tool: Wordtracker is also a very popular tool. Wordtracker helps you search for keywords or terms in Wordtracker database. Wordtracker tells you how often a keyword or phrase was searched for and how many competition sites are using that keyword. Like Overture, the list of keywords and phrases returned might give you new words or phrases that you missed or haven’t considered using.

• Wordtracker also gives you a top 1,000 keyword list of the most frequently searched for terms and a Competition Search option that helps you determine the competitiveness of each phrase. This Wordtracker list helps you figuring out how hard it will be to reach a specific rank for a specific search phrase or keyword. Full version of Wordtracker costs you money each month, but you can get a lite free version of Wordtracker at this url address: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Google’s Keyword Tool might be the most popular keyword selection tool. I use it all the time. Google Adwords offers similar options as other tools, but it is free. Additionally it can examine your page or the whole site and gives you keyword suggestions. When you type in a keyword, you get the list of similar keywords, and Google Adwords also tells you how competitive these keywords are. Google Adwords is supposed to be used only for selecting the keywords for your PPC campaign, but you can easily use it for selection your SEO keywords also .

Keywords suggestion tools are not only giving you info on how competitive a keywords is, you’re also checking to see if a keyword or search phrase is popular, and you’re keeping your eyes open for those unexpected keywords that are not highly competitive but are completely relevant to your site.

When you are using keyword suggestion tool you should always check your existing keywords that you are already using on your site. You should find out how competitive these keywords are, how many searches they have in search engines per day. You can find out which keywords are effective and which are not.

The effective keywords are the keywords that bring you visitors and goal conversions. These keywords are the keywords you should hang on to. The keywords that are not performing well should be replaced for better keywords.

Basically your keywords research is an ongoing thing, you should never stop using keywords research tools and checking potential new and existing keywords how well they are performing on your site.

Here are some more tips on selecting correct keywords:

• Search the keywords from the point of view of your potential customers.
• Select as many relevant keywords or phrases as possible.
• Always monitor your keywords to see which are giving you the most visitors and keyword conversion. Keep the good keywords and ditch the bad keywords.
• Select keywords and phrases that aren’t the most competitive on the internet, but you should also not choose the least competitive also. Medium competitive words are the keywords you should target without spending a huge budget.

Here are some of my rules I am using when posting to Craigslist.

• Craigslist is one of the most popular sites in the world with a huge database of different topics, from jobs, cars, love connections, housing, resumes.

Craigslist is very very popular that is why it is often a target of spammers.

Craigslist has each month over 10 million new posted Craigslist ads and that is why it is said to be in top 30 of most visited sites in the world.

Craigslist.org is a daily spammer target zone, they try everything to post as many ads as possible per day on Craigslist to different cities, because usually Craigslist community is very responsive to your ads.

Usually most of the problems are easy to overcome when designing your site. But some can be quite bothersome. Let’s mention so called Black Hat Techniques, a taboo SEO technique. Many spammers are using these techniques. Black Hat Techniques are used with only one goal – increasing your rankings in search engines. So my suggestion is to stay away from them if you want to have your site online for indefinite time.

Domain cloaking is one of Black Hat Techniques. The goal of domain cloaking is to show users different content than search engines. So page that has been built for search engines has small or no value to users and vice versa.

SEO is not always compatible with programming languages. So you have to know how is the best way to use them without stopping crawlers from doing their job.

JavaScript is a programming language used for creating dynamic content. Usually it is not SEO-friendly. It completely halts a search engine crawler indexing your site, the result is lower ranking in SERPs or even exclusion from rankings.

There is a solution. You have to put all the java script code in the external file. So all the java script is run from an external file on your server. So how to externalize your JavaScript:

When you are developing your SEO strategy, there are always be elements that require special dedicated approach. Especially sites like portals may need a different SEO approach than the standard web site.

How you fix these elements will impact the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

Some portals are considered to be spam with the only goal funneling users to other web sites and
content. Many people are still creating portals only for the link building purposes.

Search engines have special filters to detect such spam portals. They can detect abnormal linking, duplicate content, interlinking strategies, and other similar indicators.

Web-site optimization is creating a website that will be discovered by search engines and of course search

directories. Not all the aspects of correct optimization are keywords, links, meta tags. There are much more elements to optimize for successful optimization.

I would say it does not matter who you choose to be your host, but important factor is where your domain host is.

For example if your domain host is in England and you have a website for American population, your rankings may suffer.

There are many elements that has to be optimized to achieve the best ranking. For example having only optimized meta tags without the proper content and links will not be good.

Optimizing your pages for the right keywords in meta tags will not be sufficient without having content or if the content is not readable by search engines.

Entry and exit pages are the first and last pages that a visitor sees when he visits your site. Entry page isn’t necessarily always the home page of your website. It can be any page on your site that he lands on from search engines, incoming links, bookmarks etc.