Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Over the past several weeks, you’ve invested both money and time in your PPC

starter campaign. This week you’ll move on to the next steps, assess and prioritize, and

use what you learn to inform both your PPC and organic SEO efforts. We’ll get you

started on some new endeavors even as you take stock of older ones:

Monday:

PPC Sanity Check

Tuesday:

Organic Apples and Oranges

Wednesday:

A/B Testing

Thursday:

Close the PPC ROI Loop

Friday:

PPC Quick Check/Link Building

Monday: PPC Sanity Check

Remember “algoholics,” those people who obsessively follow the organic search engine

algorithms? Well, we aren’t trained in psychology, but we think we’ve identified two

new SEO disorders: obsessively cutting out low-performing keyphrases because you

can’t stand the clutter (we call this PPC-OCD) and the inability to stop making little

campaign changes (this is PPC-HD). The purpose of today’s task is twofold: First, to

give you some guidelines on how to “read” your PPC data like an expert, and second,

to encourage those of you with itchy trigger fingers to make changes to your campaign

without sabotaging its success.

Your PPC Sanity Check starts with lining up your PPC keywords from best per-

forming to worst. So far, in the course of creating two monthly reports, you’ve identi-

fied your top performing PPC keyterms based on your own criteria. Probably you

chose to order them by click-through rate, conversion rate, or some combination of the

two. Today, using the same criteria, you’re going to take a look at your entire PPC key-

word list and decide whether it makes sense to delete any keywords.

As you look through your data, you may find that there is a fairly even spread of

clicks or conversions throughout your list of keywords. Or more likely, you may find a

nice group of performers at the top and a steep drop-off thereafter. Perhaps you even

have a disturbingly long list of zero-performers. But is it really time to prune your PPC

campaign? Probably not. Before you give in to your slashing instinct, take the time to

apply some solid analysis. Here are the most common performance failures and possible

ways to improve them:

• Keywords with low click-through rates

• Keywords with low conversion rates

Now:

Use your PPC service to create a keyword report for your campaign so far, and sort the keywords

from highest to lowest performers.

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