When it comes to Google traffic, people almost always go for either Google or organic.
But not realizing that one can help the other.
On-page SEO can help you with Adwords. Without going into too much detail here, it’s about doing your pages so that Google gives you a good “Quality Score”, which lets you pay less per click. Those just strictly doing Adwords often miss out on doing basic SEO that can decrease their costs.
Now for those of us that are looking at SEO, Adwords can have tremendous benefit to your actual revenue from SEO.
How?
By letting you do fast experimentation to see which terms actually convert for you.
A lot of business just want to rank “for my main keyword”. They’re slugging it out with everyone else trying to rank for the obvious keywords. And those keywords may not even convert very well. You need to get heavy traffic from them to get any sales at all.
But let’s say you start with Adwords (or other PPC) and try a range of different keywords. Including deeper (getting into long-tail) keywords.
Try a good range. Think of 3 and 4 (or more) word phrases.
And you have tracking so you can see the conversion rate by keyword.
After you let it run for a while (to get some conversion data), I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll be surprised by the results.
You’ll probably find that the main keywords you really cared about don’t convert nearly as well as you’d like.
And if you’ve done a good job of thinking of other (longer) keywords, you’ll probably find some hidden gems there.
Those will be the keywords that are used by your real customers … and used when they’re getting closer to actually buying.
For example, say you’re selling DVDs for the show “Lost”.
The trap is to think you need to rank high for “Lost”. So you knock yourself out (content and links) to be seen at all for that.
And you think “ABC lost” or “Lost show”.
I can tell you from experience that such terms are too broad for actual buyers. You’ll be putting in huge effort to get any sales at all.
But let’s say you experiment with Adwords first, like I described.
You find that “Lost season 1″ and “buy Lost DVDs” (and others) convert very well.
So then you laser-focus on getting good rankings for THOSE phrases.
It’s not always about gunning for the high-volume keywords. It’s about the keywords that actually bring you the money!
Pingback: Alex Hall
Pingback: Alex Hall
Pingback: Emir Muracevic
Great article by the way!!
Another 2 main advantages of working both on SEO and on Paid Search traffic is 1.that you can always test what works best for each specific scenario (Is the revenue much better when bidding on Adwords or just appearing on SEO results?); and 2. when traffic quality is not as good as expected for a specific KW. In other words, You can decide to stop bidding for that KW and let SEO do the work. Like this, you will be able to save budget and re-spend it on other better performing KeyWords.