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Using PPC To Maximize
Your Search Engine Positioning ROI
di
Dave Davies
www.beanstalk-inc.com
The quest for higher search
engine positioning on the natural search engines is generally the quest to
increase revenue from a product or service. It is not the rankings
themselves that hold any special value; it is the visitors that they bring
and the resulting increase in business. It is for this reason that the PPC
engines and namely the secondary ones are a great tool in developing a
campaign strategy for the natural engines that will produce the highest
return on investment.
While tools such as the
Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool and
WordTracker are great tools for helping to determine which phrases are
most searched, they cannot provide you with which phrases will produce the
highest return on investment and let's be honest, search engine positioning
is not about traffic it's about money. While traffic can often mean money,
knowing which search phrases are going to lead to the highest conversion
rates will give you a great advantage going into your SEO campaign.
While testing phrases on
the PPC engines will result in an increased timeframe for your search engine
positioning campaign, this step can result in much higher conversions from
the traffic you are going to get. For example, if you were a business owner
who was promoting a brand new acne treatment and you were to simply look for
the phrases with the highest numbers of searches to target in the promotions
for your site, you would undoubtedly settle on the single keyword "acne" as
your primary targeted phrase. Will this produce the highest ROI? Unlikely
and lets take a look at why:
Keyword
phrase: acne
Searches: 2,470/day estimated on WordTracker
Inbound links of #1 site: 2,642 on MSN
Number of pages of #1 site: 34,100
Approximate cost to
optimize site assuming it is new with 50+ pages: $7,000 - $10,000 with
guarantee.
Now, let's a take a look at
a less competitive phrase such as "acne treatment":
Keyword
phrase: acne treatment
Searches: 516/day estimated on WordTracker
Inbound links of #1 site: 216 on MSN
Number of pages of #1 site: 153
Approximate cost to
optimize site assuming it is new with 20+ pages: $3,000 - $5,000 with
guarantee.
Armed with this information
you would then want to test these two phrases on the PPC engines. Engines
such as Google and Overture provide great reporting tools that will enable a
website owner to actually track which phrases are converting for them,
however at $8.85/click on Overture to be #1 for "acne" or $2.90 to be #1 for
"acne treatment", that option may be just a bit out of your price range.
And so we have the secondary engines.
Pay-per-click engines such
as Enhance Interactive (formerly Ah-ha) make a great testing ground for
those choosing their keyword phrases. Ranking #1 for "acne" on Enhance can
be had for $0.15/click and "acne treatment" is only $0.23 to be #1. Setting
aside the money that could potentially be made from the PPC engines
themselves, with bids this low this engine and others like it make great
testing grounds for keyword selection.
To test your keyword
phrases simply bid to be #1 or at least in the top three for a potential
primary target phrase. Keep the site ranking for a couple weeks monitoring
your traffic and the sales of your product/service. After a couple weeks
remove the phrase from your list and switch it to an alternative phrase.
Again, monitor this success of this phrase for a couple weeks. After you
have tested all of your potential primary phrases you will be in a position
to assess which one will produce the highest return on investment.
Selecting which phrase will
produce the highest ROI based on these numbers can be a bit more involved,
weighing a number of factors such as the cost in either time or money (or
both) to optimize for the various phrases, the sales-per-click ratio, etc.
Basically what you want to do is consider your budget vs. how much can you
make per click and thus, how many sales you can expect per day based on the
keyword phrase you have chosen to target. If a promotion can pay for itself
over a 3 to 6 month period of time, thus producing a surplus after it is
paid off, it can be considered a successful promotion.
It should be noted that
this step is not an exact science. The number of sales you will get per day
will be dependant on exactly what position you attain on the natural engines
(your content is also important obviously, however you will have used your
existing content on the PPC engines so for the most part you will be
comparing apples-to-apples). There will be some guestimation but you will
get a good idea of how many sales you would make if you ranked in the same
position for all of the possible phrases.
While I have not tested the
above noted phrases on the PPC engines and applied them to the natural
engines I would feel confident in predicting the ROI would be higher for
"acne treatment" based on two factors:
1 - The competition is
lower and thus the number of sales required to produce a return on
investment is about half that of the phrase "acne".
2 - The phrase is far more targeted. People searching for "acne" may be
writing papers on the subject or just looking for information whereas people
searching for "acne treatment" are far more likely to be looking for a
solution to an acne problem.
While I have my instinct on
the subject, were I to advise a client on the best possible strategy I would
have to recommend testing these phrase on the PPC engines. It may extend
the promotion for a bit but in the end the decision on which keyword phrase
makes the best target will be based far more on statistics and facts than a
simple guestimate.
Additional
Considerations:
While this article's
purpose is to explain how PPC engines can be used to help increase the ROI
of a search engine positioning campaign, your use of the PPC engines should
not stop there. While you are testing out phrases you should be making
sales as well. If the revenue generated from the PPC promotion is higher
that it's cost then stick with it. PPC engines are a great testing ground
however they're also a great source of leads and revenue if used correctly.
There are many PPC engines
out there. We've researched a number of them and posted the ones that have
produced the highest ROI for our clients on our PPC Engines page. These are
the engines that we have found are worth sticking with once any testing
phase is complete. In the case of the primary engines (Google and Overture)
you will have to use your discretion based on the cost-per-click to
determine whether they are worth testing or advertising on.
_________________________
ROI CALCULATOR
Tool per il calcolo del ROI delle campagne di Search Engine Marketing
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