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Part 2: Paid Placement (PPC) SEO Tutorial

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1. Introduction

If you’ve used Google, Yahoo, AOL search, Ask, or most any other major search engine, you’ve seen paid placement ads in action.  They’re the “sponsored links” that appear above or to the right of the regular search engine results.

You can greatly increase the flow of traffic to your website by using Google’s AdWords program and/or Yahoo’s Sponsored Search program. These two advertising programs that the two biggest search engines offer are also known as pay-per-click (or PPC).

But you don’t just want more traffic.  You want more qualified traffic, and that’s the great strength of these programs.  They take people who are looking for exactly what you have to offer and bring them to your website.  Some online businesses have found their sales increased many times over when they effectively took advantage of these advertising methods.

And while these advertising programs will cost you money, if you use them correctly your return on investment can more than justify the costs.

But what about other types of search engine optimization?  Regular search engine listings don’t cost money, right?  True.  It’s still very important to optimize websites using the techniques mentioned in the first part of this report.  But since there’s often great competition for most of the profitable search terms, it’s sometimes necessary to augment your search engine optimization by buying good results with AdWords and/or Sponsored Search.  If you have little ongoing advertising budget or if your site has little or no competition, then regular search engine optimization will be a primary marketing tool for your website.  But if you have some dollars a day to spend on advertising, keep reading!

2. Create an Account

In order to start profiting with AdWords or Sponsored Search you’ll first need to create an account.  For Google’s AdWords go to https://adwords.google.com/select/ and for Yahoo’s Sponsored Search go to http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/?mkt=us.  You’ll create your ads, enter your personal and billing information, and within minutes your ads can be online.

Which one should you use?  Google has more market share so you’ll get by just using Google, but for maximum saturation you should also use Yahoo’s program.

3. Create Your Ads

Let’s say you own a website that sells celebrity autographs.  Let’s assume that the website was search engine optimized and it ranks well for a few important search terms like “movie star autographs” and “movie star signatures”.  That’s great!  But say you have twenty competitors, and some of them rank better than you do.  And on top of that, let’s say there are tons of movie star fan sites out there, with some of them ranking better than you do as well.  How can you cut through the clutter and sell your autographs to people who want to buy them?

If you have an AdWords account, you can set it up so that any time someone does a search for “movie star autographs” your ad will pop up at the top of the search engine’s results page!  How?  By paying for the privilege.  You tell AdWords that you’ll pay 5 cents for your ad.  But AdWords doesn’t charge you 5 cents each time it shows your ad.  It only charges you when someone actually clicks on your ad to go to your website.  Compare that with printing a thousand flyers of which only fifty get read.  Less wasted money!

But say you have a competitor, and they’ve already set up an AdWords account before you did.  They said they’d pay 5 cents for clicks for “movie star autographs”.  Are you out of luck because they were there first?  Not at all.  You just say you’ll pay ten cents.  Then, the next time someone searches for “movie star autographs” your ad will appear above your competitor’s.

In “real life”, some search terms are very popular and so you’d have to pay a lot to get a top listing.  Recently I read about the term “mesothilioma” costing $51 per click!  But most terms cost in the range of 10 cents to a few dollars.  It’s generally regarded that a top listing isn’t all that much more effective than a number two or even number three listing, so it’s OK to get the number two listing and pay half as much.

You may be thinking to yourself, “this sounds like a great way to lose a lot of money to Google very quickly.”  Well, yes.  But there are ways to do this wisely, and following these guidelines will make the difference between getting involved in a profitable advertising venture and throwing your money away.  Here’s what you need to do:

4. Set Your Budget Limits

Both AdWords and Sponsored Search allow you to set daily limits.  Say you’ve calculated that you can afford an ad budget of $90 a month or $3 a day.  Within your AdWords account options, you can set your daily limit to $3 a day.  Say your bid is 5 cents.  Once your ad(s) has been clicked on 60 times in one day (60 x 5 cents = $3) it will no longer appear, and you can no longer be charged for your ad on that day.  By using the limit feature, you can advertise exactly as much or as little as your budget allows.

5. Target Your Keyphrases

If your website sells movie star autographs, don’t trigger your ad with the keyphrase “Moscow Vacation Resort”.  That much should be obvious.  But try to really think about your keyphrases.  “Movie star autograph”, “movie star autographs”, “movie star signature”, “movie star signed document”, “actor autograph”, “actress signature”, etc.—these are all OK keyphrases.  But they could be better.  How?  How about “buy movie star autograph”, “purchase actor autograph”, etc.  People who are ready to buy something will often use the word “buy” in their search term.

Or even better, if you have an autograph of Joan Crawford for sale, do some keyphrase triggers like “Joan Crawford autograph” and “Joan Crawford signature”.  Starting to get the idea?  The more specific the better.  And also, the more specific the keyphrase, the greater the chances of the bid price being lower.  One word keyphrases will often cost dollars per click.  But if you can think of a keyphrase with many words that people actually search for, then the chances are good that it will only cost nickels per click.  A good source for keyphrases to use can be your hosting server’s search engine statistics log.  Your web designer can help you access and/or decipher this log.

6. Create Good Ads

When creating your ad, use the keyphrase trigger as the ad headline. If your keyphrase trigger is “Joan Crawford autograph” and your ad headline is “Joan Crawford autograph”, that inspires more clicks than if your ad headline were more generic, like “Movie Star Autograph”.  For the body of the ad you should shortly and sweetly tell the viewer what they get when they click your ad.  For example, “High quality framed Joan Crawford autograph delivered in 48 hours!”

7. Target Your Landing Page

Let’s say your keyphrase trigger is “Joan Crawford autograph” and your ad headline is “Joan Crawford Autograph”, what do you think the headline should be on your webpage that the viewer lands on when they click your ad?  That’s right!  “Joan Crawford Autograph”! 

You can spice it up a little.  Maybe something like “Purchase the Joan Crawford autograph pictured below!”  The point is, from keyphrase trigger to ad headline to your web page, the wording should be as much the same as possible.  This will inspire trust in the viewer and encourage follow-through (i.e. actually purchasing the item).

Now you might be saying to yourself, “Well, I sell hundreds of autographs. Do I need to create a different ad and a different website landing page for each different keyphrase?”  The short answer is yes.  And while this takes a little extra time, it’s the best way to increase your sales.  The long answer is, it depends.  Only experience will tell you what works best for your business.  You might do just as well with ten keyphrases, ten ads and ten landing pages as you would with ten keyphrases, four ads and two landing pages.  Ideally you’ll have the time and/or funds to perform ongoing testing of results and refinement of  your ads and website landing pages. 

8. A Second Example: Selling a Service

Let’s say you don’t sell tangible things but instead offer a service.  Say your website is all about your German tutoring.  You make house calls in the San Francisco area and teach basic German to businesspeople who are about to travel to Deutschland.  Your keyphrases should not be “German” or “learn German”.  Those types of phrases are way too generic.  You’d be bidding lots of money for those phrases since they’re so generic, and a high proportion of the people who’d click on them probably wouldn’t be interested in what your site had to say.  Instead use phrases like “San Francisco German tutor”, "learn business German in San Francisco", “San Francisco German teacher” and “San Francisco German lessons”.

Sure, these phrases will get a lot fewer searches than “learn German”, but the searches they do get will be highly targeted for exactly what it is you offer and where it is you offer it. 

And these keyphrases will cost much less than the more generic ones.  Your ad headline should read “San Francisco German Tutor” (in this case it’d probably be OK to use just one ad in conjunction with all three of your keyphrases), and the ad content should read something like “Going to Germany? Learn basic business German in just one day!”  Then of course your website should say something like:

9. Warnings

Pay-per-click programs can be a great money-maker.  For the search engines!  But if you learn the lessons of this report and implement them, you’ll be spending your money wisely and making a great ROI.  Thousands of online businesses rely on AdWords and/or Sponsored Search as their primary or sole marketing method for generating sales leads.

One thing you may be wondering is, “What if my competitors have nothing better to do with their time than click my ads all day, thus costing me money, depleting my account and allowing their ads to display unchallenged?”  The search engines have elaborate systems in place to detect this kind of activity, and your account should not be debited for it.  Every computer on the internet has a unique identifying code, and if the search engines detect that your ad is being clicked multiple times from the same computer, they’ll assume that someone is messing with your ad and they won’t debit your account.

10. Summary

An AdWords or Overture ad campaign is something you can set up and maintain yourself if:

• You have a good grasp of your target market,
• You know how they use search engines,
• You’re good at crafting classified ads,
• You know how to make website landing pages. 

If you need assistance with any of this, you can also ask Crunch42 Web Services to help you.  It can be set up for you and then the reins handed over to you.

Once you’ve put your website online, written lots of great text content for it, optimized the content, gotten links to your website, submitted your website to lots of directories, it can take a few months before you see any results from your efforts.  This is normal.  You may see some results within a few days, some better results in a few weeks, and then after three or four months you’ll probably see the full picture.  If you need instant results, you’ll need to use paid placement.

Search engines are constantly refining the formulas they use to determine how to rank pages.  This usually goes un-noticed by the public and website owners, but sometimes they change their formula so radically it can completely knock your website out of its accustomed spot.  This is unfortunately normal, and you can minimize this “dropping out” by making sure your site has followed the instructions in this report:

• It has lots of great, unique text content.
• It has lots of reputable, relevant websites linking to it.
• It’s listed in the dmoz.org directory and possibly other directories.

And this is an ongoing process.  You should always be adding more relevant, useful, unique text content.  You should always be trying to get more inbound links.  Web logs (blogs) are great for this.  People with websites that dominate their field spend some time every day working on adding content and links.

Crunch42 Web Services builds small and large websites to rank well in search engines.  Get a free estimate and proposal for your project by calling Julian at toll free 866.204.1033 or by sending an email to julian@crunch42.com.  Also visit the rest of this website for more information.

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