If you’re running a pay per click PPC campaign beside your SEO efforts, at a decent click rate you’re spending around £5,000 per month on total (that’s not including any bids you may have on). You need to optimize every step of your campaign, even if this means taking a few steps back if it doesn’t make the grade. But if you do a good job, you’ll get good results. Let’s take a look at what you need to be doing to ensure you’re running a great campaign
Networks
First off, identify which networks you prefer to use to run your search campaigns. Rather than diversify and have diverse landing pages for your Search, Display or editorial interfaces, as well as the choice of ad variations to go with, choose one network. I would also advise that most of the most important keywords and the ones your highest click through rates should be appearing in the pages appropriately tied to the keywords you have chosen. In many cases if this is the case, just as strongly, you’ll want to see your adverts directing to the important pages where they’ll take advantage of the most visitors.
Content
If you’re serious about running a profitable PPC campaign then you need to ensure that every page of your website is optimized for the best possible visitor experience. This also means that every page should be keyword stuffed, and ideally it will be the home page. I think this may be getting slightly technical, but always put all of your content in the right language, with the right grammar, the right attention-getting headline and the right implementation of keywords. It’s worth taking the time to do this rather than having someone else do it for you.
Whatever keywords you elect to use, make sure they’re actually relevant to your page. There’s no point focusing on highly competitive terms that are extremely unlikely to bring you any visitors (such as ‘lottery’!).
Split testing your page
I don’t recommend you going all out with split testing of landing pages, but you can at least split test two or three landing pages for each keyword. You’ll only ever improve one page, so split testing should be done in very small quantities and in small areas. I recommend you do this in any introductory wave of your market – that way you’ll be able to pick up valuable data as well as relevant clues for improved pages.
Keywords
Much like browsing the most popular search engine results, make sure your keyword selection process is based on several areas of your budget – your ROI. When deciding which keywords you want to be targeting, you’ll need to remember the difference between getting visitors to your site and getting conversions, as separately.
If you have limited marketing budget, or no budget at all, I suggest that you target keywords like “email marketing software” rather than a million competitive terms like “search engine optimization“. As a rule of thumb, try to tick off any search terms you think are getting a decent amount of traffic. You can then use that selection criteria to create pages optimized for that keyword, identify which terms are converting well, and then target those ones in more paid strategies.
You can also use the three word phrase non-specific search phrase strategy:
You can’t use the above strategy you’re using anywhere else.
Lastly, make sure you have a clear and concise conversion funnel for your product or service. You should make sure that all of your code generates immediately, and that you have a clear set of steps that the visitor must take to complete the checkout. For example, you may have a “buy now, free quotation” button. Make sure that the visitor knows exactly what they’re supposed to do. For example, you might have the following steps:
Keyword specific landing pages will also help you:
Hence, it’s vital that you get a clear picture of what your customers actually do when they get to a specific landing page, rather than just talking about it. You need to get into the mind of your visitors and part of the sales process; otherwise, you’ll still need to follow their journey, which is a long, slow way to convert them.
