Step Wise SEO

Welcome to PPC with training wheels. Here  you’re going to develop good habits and a firm grasp of how the PPC system works, using a small-budget starter campaign.

We can’t tell you what “small” means, but whether you choose to invest less than $100 or more than $1,000 a month, we’ll provide you with tips and pitfall-avoidance techniques that will help you spend your money wisely.

Your SEO Plan makes provisions for you to set up your PPC account and monitor it over the course of three months.

This should give you enough time to judge cost effectiveness, learn what you can expect to get for your money, and decide whether you have what it takes-both financially and administratively-to manage an ongoing PPC account.

Even if you’re skeptical about PPC’s place in your long-term marketing plans, we still hope to nudge you into trying PPC for the short-term:

PPC can tell you a lot about your audience and your keywords in a relatively short period of time, which makes it an excellent research tool for your organic SEO efforts.

How Do I Choose My PPC Budget?
This is one of the hardest-to-pin-down factors of SEO, and one that has as many variables as a high school algebra fair.

We’d love to put on our little green visors and help you arrive at the perfect number, but instead we’ll have to give you some general guidelines and let you do the thinking:

Ask your boss (or whoever holds the purse strings).
Whether you like it or not, somebody may already have a number that you’ll have to roll with. Let’s hope your PPC campaign pulls in enough conversions to convince them to up the budget when your trial period is over!

Look to your current cost per conversion. Perhaps you already have an idea of what a conversion costs your organization based on tracking for existing online or offline marketing programs.

The preliminary research you do this week may help you make an educated guess about how much you’d need to spend on PPC to meet or beat your current cost per conversion.

Consider your competition.
You already know whether or not you’re in a highly competitive online space. This week, with the help of the PPC engine of your choice, you’re going to attach some dollar figures to your top-priority keywords.

Will you need to spend $0.15 or $15.00 per click to wrestle into the top three PPC ranks for most of your keywords? The answer will inform your budget-making process.

Think about your own level of enthusiasm. Even though it’s likely that your PPC campaign will run smoothly, proper campaign management takes continued interest and effort.

Campaigns with larger budgets often have more keywords and more ads, taking more effort than smaller campaigns.

If you don’t foresee yourself having the ability or time to keep up a large campaign, scale down your budget, along with your expectations for clicks and conversions.

Because it helps you tune into your most productive keywords, a relatively small investment of funds can increase the effectiveness of your organic SEO campaign enormously. Here are your tasks:

Study Hall
Getting familiar with a new interface, not to mention specialized terminology and guidelines, is an important part of a smoothly run campaign.

You’ll do your homework and learn about the PPC engine you want to use so that you can be a more effective advertiser in the long term.

If All Else Fails, Flip a Coin
Having a hard time choosing which PPC service is right for you? “How the Search Engines Work Right Now,” there are bigger players and there are smaller ones in the PPC arena.

The current big guns in the U.S. market are Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords.

We won’t tell you whether to use Google AdWords or YSM. We can say that unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, you should stick with one of the top two services for your starter PPC campaign.

If you are the kind of person who needs to scrutinize the techie details before making a choice, put on your eyestrain glasses and check out the user documentation provided by the PPC services themselves.

Yourseoplan.com has links to these and other resources that will help you compare PPC services.

Use these resources to learn about YSM and Google AdWords-and any other PPC provider that interests you-and decide which is the best match to your needs. The key elements that you’ll want to research are outlined in this section.

Finalize your choice of a PPC engine and sign up for an account.

Spend the rest of your time today familiarizing yourself with the inner workings of your PPC service of choice.

The following are the most important elements for you to understand as you attack your PPC learning curve.

Editorial Guidelines Any respectable PPC service has a list of rules with which your ads must comply.

Things like limiting obnoxious SHOUTING CAPITALIZATION or limiting the use of certain terms.

Limitations on adult content and affiliate sites are also common. You should also know their editorial procedures:

Do they publish your ad right away and review it later? Is there a waiting period before new ads can go online?

Do they warn you before they take your advertisement offline, or do they just yank it for violating the guidelines?

Spending Requirements This probably won’t be a major issue if you are planning to use YSM or Google AdWords; they both offer very low minimum spending levels.

If you are considering another PPC service, be sure that you are willing to cover their minimum spending or activation fee requirements.

Keyword Matching Options If you love to micromanage, this section is for you. PPC engines, including Google and YSM, offer a variety of keyword matching controls:

• Broad matching causes your ad to display if searchers combine your keywords with other terms. For example, your ad for “wedding bands” will show when the term “platinum wedding bands” is searched.

This may include plural forms of the term, misspellings, and synonyms.

• Keyword exclusion allows you to exclude searchers who use certain words from viewing your ad. For instance, if you’re targeting “wedding bands,” you can exclude people searching for “wedding jazz bands”).

• Keyword grouping may allow you to show one ad for several different keywords, rotate multiple ads, or manage keywords as a group.

Ad Display Options It’s important to understand exactly where and when your ads will be displayed.

If you’re interested in a PPC service other than the two Biggies, make sure they’re up front about who they partner with for ad displays.

You don’t want to discover your ads unexpectedly displaying in annoying pop-up windows that may be detrimental to your branding. Many PPC services also offer these types of display controls:

• Contextual vs. search engine display. Contextual advertising displays your sponsored ads on a wide variety of websites, not just search engines.

Your service should give you the choice of whether you want to include contextual displays.

• Geotargeting allows you to display your results to searchers in a particular location.
• Dynamic Keyword Insertion places the searcher’s keywords directly into your ad. You’ll learn more about this later, when you write your ads.

Bid and Position Management Options Some bid and position management features vary among PPC services. Learn the answers to the following questions about yours:

• Adjusting bid prices: How do you change bid prices for individual keywords? What about for groups of keywords?

Can you set parameters so that your bid automatically increases or decreases based on what your competition is bidding?

• Budget caps: Can you set daily or monthly budget caps? Can you set limits so that certain bidding or cost parameters are not exceeded?

• Controlling position: What kind of control do you have over your listing position? Bid prices may not be the only factors at play in determining the position of your PPC listings.

Tracking and Reporting Options You will probably be pleased with the detail and flexibility of reports you can generate with whichever PPC engine you choose.

Your role in PPC reporting will be less about compiling data and more about finessing the report parameters to get at the information you really want.

Here are some things to look for: How recent is the data that is included in reports? Is conversion tracking an option?

Is there at-a-glance information in your campaign management interface so you won’t have to run a report to see how your PPC day is going?

You’ll be creating monthly reports with the following information at a minimum: top performing terms, total campaign cost, average cost per click, click-through rate, and total click-throughs.

Be sure you know how to find this information from your PPC services reporting screen.

Account Services Some PPC services will help you get up and running. YSM and Google both offer setup assistance services for a fee.

We generally don’t recommend paying for such services, and anyway, you won’t need them if you follow the procedures in this article.

However, if you are destined to be a big spender with a PPC service (on the order of $10,000 or more per month), you may be able to get the free services of an account rep who can smooth over some of the bumps in the process.

Your PPC service may ask you to input your keywords and bids before you can complete the sign-up process. You can just enter in your company name as a keyword for now.

Prep Your PPC Keywords
Here you’ll compile a list of keywords for your PPC starter campaign. Your top 10 or so target keywords are a starting point, but any terms on your long list are fair game.

Targeting the Long Tail
Perhaps you’ve heard of the “long tail” theory.

It describes how our culture and commerce is moving away from a small number of very popular products (or movies, or dances, or even ideas) toward a very large number of niche products or activities.

For instance, not terribly long ago there were only three television networks that everybody watched (a short head).

Now, there are hundreds of specialty networks, each with a much smaller audience (a long tail).

How does this apply to Your SEO Plan?
In SEO, a short head search is something like “motel,” while a long tail search might be “baltimore pool motel airport.”

The short head search is very broad and is used commonly, while the long tail search is very specific and is used much less frequently.

Compared to organic optimization, PPC makes it much easier for you to target long tail searchers.

Here’s why: In organic SEO, each keyterm you target takes a certain minimum commitment of time and energy, so it wouldn’t make sense to put hours of effort into rewriting your site for once-a-month, ultra-focused queries.

In PPC, on the other hand, you can add your long tail keywords to your account for free-and pay only when they receive clicks.

Why sponsor long tail searches? For one, they aren’t likely to have much competition, which means lower costs per click.

For another, by the time a searcher is using a long tail term, they are probably closer to the end of the buying process.

This makes long tail searchers a very desirable group. Look again at the example: “motel” compared to “baltimore pool motel airport.” Maybe you’d get 15,000 clicks for “motel” and only 100 clicks for “baltimore pool motel airport.”

But if you run a motel near the Baltimore/Washington International Airport with a pool, you’re likely to get more reservations from those long tail visitors.

Experiment with some long tail terms in your PPC campaign and you may discover some top performers that become candidates for future organic SEO efforts.

PPC engines have their own tools to help you figure out which terms you want to add to your campaign and how much you want to spend on each.

However, we’ve found that it’s often better to use our own simple spreadsheet, especially for small or new campaigns.

Using a spreadsheet to record your keyword choices cuts down on the PPC interface learning curve, since everything you need is together in one document rather than partitioned in various PPC reporting or admin screens.

And spreadsheets allow you a little more flexibility in manipulating parameters that matter to you, like maximum bid price or predicted click-through rate.

Below is a worksheet that we think will be useful to you in the planning phase of your PPC campaign, called the PPC Keywords Worksheet.

The PPC Keywords Worksheet contains the following columns: Keyword, Category, Bid for Top Position, Estimated Click-Throughs, Estimated Cost, Conversion Value, and Landing Page URL. See the table, for an example of how a company of Babyfuzzkin might fill out his worksheet.

Here’s how you’ll fill in your worksheet:

Keyword In the Keyword column, add your top-priority keywords and any additional keywords you’re interested in testing.

Review your long list of keywords. Were there any terms that caused a lot of debate but didn’t make the cut?

Were there two terms that seemed equally promising? Results of this test PPC campaign will be a great tiebreaker.

How many keywords should you have in your PPC campaign? That depends on two things: your budget, and your desire to stay within the hour-a-day time frame.

But we’ll throw you a bone with this vague suggestion: somewhere between 10 and 50. For the purposes of this PPC trial period, it’s best to keep your campaign smaller so that you can give proper attention to the details.

Landing Page URL For each keyword, note which landing page you want to send the visitor to.

Category Displaying the same ad for a group of related keywords helps reduce campaign management time.

Considering your limited time to work on campaign creation and maintenance, it would be reasonable to have from three to five categories of keywords. (Category names are not displayed to searchers. They are for administrative use only.)

Even though more categories require more management and more ads, it’s probably better to err on the side of too many categories than too few. Here are possible ways to group your keywords:

• By landing page: For example, an animal feed distributor may want to create categories for its Pet Care Tips page for terms like “overweight dogs” and its Horse Care Tips page for terms like “preventing colic in horses.”

• By target audience: For example, a category called Pet Products for terms like “dog food” and “cat food” and another category called Livestock Products for terms like “bovine feed supplement” and “equine grain mix.”

• By concept: You can categorize based on the needs your product or service fills or the concerns behind the searches.

For example, a category called Low Cost for terms like “cheap dog food” or a category called Pampering for terms like “dog treats” or “dog rewards.”

Bid for Position In the Bid for Position column, use the PPC engine to research the amount of money you would have to pay to get into the top spot for each of your keywords.

The PPC Keywords Worksheet doesn’t make a provision for bidding lower than first place.

This is for the sake of simplicity and not necessarily because we think you have to keep your ads in the top positions.

You can always add a lower cost to the Bid column, but if you do, assume that the PPC engine’s estimated click-through rate-and by extension, the estimated cost-is shooting high.

Estimated Click-Throughs In the Estimated Click-Throughs column, use the PPC engine to find the estimated click-throughs your ad will receive for each keyword in a “IN ell period of time (month or day).

Conversion Value In the Conversion Value column, enter your estimate of the value of the coil conversion in dollars.

If a monetary estimate doesn’t make sense for this conversion, give it a low/medium/high value based on how important a conversion for this term would he for your business.

For example, a tree-trimming service might rank “large estate grounds maintenance” as high while ranking “cheap arborist” as low because a larger tree-trimming job means more green for them!

The Estimated Cost column has been programmed to calculate automatically. But if you’d prefer to use the number provided by your PPC engine, feel free to replace this column with that data.

Write Your Ad Text
Depending on your talent with words, today may be a fun little excursion into copywriting, or it may be as frustrating as trying to bait a fishing hook with mittens on. If you have writers on your team, this is a great time to include them.

For each of your keyword categories, you’re going to create a succinct, compelling ad that is substantially more interesting than your competitors’.

You may want to write two or three ads for each category if your PPC service rotates ads for you.

If your PPC service allows or requires a separate ad for each keyword, feel free to customize to your heart’s content, but you can also do well with just one well written ad for each keyword group.

Your HTML title and meta description tag for each landing page are a good starting point, but you’ll probably need to edit them substantially for PPC use, in part due to editorial guidelines and character limits.

You can read your PPC service’s guidelines for lots of advice on writing ads (after all, they make money on your click-throughs, so they have every interest in your success!).
Here are some additional tips that we think will help you:

DO use keywords in the text. Studies show that people are more likely to click on your ad if the exact keyword they searched for is incorporated into your ad text.

DO be true to your landing page. Make sure that you write each ad with its intended landing page(s) in mind.

Does the ad mention a specific product or solution? The landing page had better contain a clear path to it.

Does the ad set up a need? The landing page should tell your visitor exactly how to fulfill it.

DO snoop on your competitors. If you’re stumped, and even if you aren’t, enter your keywords into the search engines and see what you’re up against in the PPC venue.

If everyone’s ads are mentioning a certain topic, such as their low, low prices, you might not want to ignore it in your own ad.

Then again, if you notice that you’re competing against a clutch of nearly identical ads, you may want to describe yourself using language that will help you stand out.

DO use dynamic keyword insertion if it’s available… If a searcher enters the term “halogen bulbs” or “chandeliers,” you may want to format your ad to say, “Halogen Bulbs and other lighting inventory”

or “Chandeliers and other lighting inventory” to match the search. This can be a powerful way to attract the attention of your targeted audience.

…but DON’T insert the wrong keywords. If you’ve ever seen what appear to be inappropriate PPC ads, you can probably blame careless dynamic keyword insertion.

It can create almost comical messages like “Tonsillitis: Buy Now at Shop-n-Ship.com.” Likewise, if you’re using broad matching, you might end up inserting nonsensical

or misspelled words into your ads, so think through each keyword carefully in the context of your ad before using this feature.

DO include a compelling message. What makes your audience tick? Is it price? Is it the hope of succeeding at something or the fear of failing at something?

Is it convenience? A desire for quality? A need to fit in, or to stand out? Use your ad text to speak to this need.

Enter Your Data into the PPC System
Now the task is to transfer all of your keyword and cost preferences to your PPC account without making it “live” yet.

For each keyword or group of keywords, you’ll assign the attributes required by your PPC engine of choice, like cost per click, maximum bids, and daily/monthly budget cap.

You already have these numbers in your PPC Keywords Worksheet. You’ll categorize your keywords and insert the ads you wrote.

You’ll also assign appropriate landing pages for each keyword or ad. (And, to avoid wasting your money, make sure each landing page URL is working properly!)

At this point may be a simple cut-and-paste job, or it might be a little more complex
as you get used to navigating the campaign setup and management screens.

Turn On Your PPC Campaign
If you’ve finished optimizing your website, your landing pages will be clearly relevant to your PPC ads and targeted users will be able to find what they need.

Don’t flip the PPC switch until your site is ready. If your site content doesn’t match your advertising campaign, it will confuse or annoy your visitors, and it may be removed by the PPC service for noncompliance of editorial guidelines.

Assuming your site is ready for the trick-or-treaters to come ringing the bell, let’s get started.

It’s best to start this task early in the day so you can check that all is well before you go home for the night.

Rather then spend a continuous hour on this task, we recommend you block out two half-hour segments of time.

The first half hour you will use to turn on your account, which is probably as simple as changing the attribute “paused” or “offline” to “live” or “online.”

Later in the day, you’ll spend another half hour checking in on your account to make sure all is well.

Here are things to watch out for:
• No impressions. Don’t expect miracles, but do make sure you actually turned on the campaign.

• Too many clicks. If you’re already close to blowing your budget after a few hours, something is out of whack.

Either you underestimated the number of clicks your ad would receive (you could have worse problems!) or you entered your bid price incorrectly.

• The wrong ad showing up for the wrong keyword. It would be a fairly easy mistake to, say, place an ad meant for your Industrial Products category into your Home Products category.

Enter some of your keywords into the search engine and view your ads to make sure you haven’t made this kind of error.

We do not recommend micromanaging your ads on a daily basis; the PPC engines’ bid management tools should make this unnecessary.

Regardless, today is a good day to monitor them closely to make sure you haven’t made any boneheaded mistakes.

Also, seeing your PPC ads online is a moment for celebration in your SEO campaign! After you turn on the account and check for mistakes, send out an e-mail to your team!
Enlist them to help you catch any glitches that you may miss over the next few days.

You will also want to record some of the basic setup information about your campaign in your PPC Keywords Worksheet.

We know from experience that once you start running multiple PPC campaigns, or if you decide to share or hand off campaign management responsibility, it’s great to have this information in an easy-to-find location:

• Date campaign was turned on
• Maximum monthly budget
• Total number of keywords
• Account login information