3 Strategies For Choosing Your Keywords for PPC

Interested in starting a pay per click campaign for your website? The first step in planning out your pay per click campaign is to choose your keywords. Of course, most people just immediately want to choose the keywords and key phrases with the most searches per month for their location, however, there are so many other strategies you should be using to determine your keywords, such as:

1. Limit Yourself

One common mistake I see when people are planning out their pay per click campaign is their tendency to choose keywords and key phrases with millions of clicks per month, but this is actually a horrible factor to use in determining your keywords because what your ultimate goal should be to NARROW your traffic so you get the most bang for your buck.

2. See Through Your Visitors Eyes

This is probably one of the toughest parts of choosing your keywords so it’s actually best to bring in an unbiased opinion for this. Basically you want to know what keywords and key phrases users are going to search for to find you and actually want to find you. It’s always good to bring in someone else to help you get an outside opinion.

3. The More Specific, The Better

Once again, I cannot stress how important it is to narrow your results as this will not only get much more targeted traffic to your landing page, but it will also allow you to get better results for your pay per click investment. You want to focus on keywords and key phrases that have 500 monthly searches per month – this may sound terrifying low, but it will give you much better results in the end.

Hopefully these tips on choosing keywords for your pay per click campaign have helped you in making better pay per click campaign decisions. For more information on pay per click management, visit www.LookSmart.com.

5 SEO Strategies For Your Blog

Anyone these days, no matter what profession you are, should be operating a blog. Even if you post little blog posts once every week or two, it’s a great way to increase your credibility in your profession, be found through searches, and of course, increase your search engine optimization. Here are five SEO strategies to make the most out of your blog:

1. Content, Content, Content.

Don’t just write a blog “for SEO purposes”. You want to create meaningful content that your visitors will actually have use for. You want to provide valuable information for your visitors so they immediately see that you know your information and they learn to trust you through the content you provide. By posting an article that has the keyword “search engine optimization” in it 27 times – it will be GREAT for SEO, but once you drive the traffic there, they’ll quickly realize based on the poor content that there’s nothing of use in the article for them.

2. Interact on Other Blogs

You should be finding the most influential bloggers in your field, and subscribe to them. Then you’ll receive an email notification for each blog post they publish, you can go and skim through the comment on them. But the key to blog commenting isn’t just to comment for the sake of SEO because usually these comments are bland and if the blogger gets even a small sense that your trying to promote your own blog, they’ll more than likely not publish your comment by pay per click. The key here is to actually put forth a meaningful comment that contributes to a discussion.

3. Use Tools (Example: Wordpress)

If you aren’t using Wordpress to house your blog, I highly suggest you make the transition over. Wordpress is a great tool, ESPECIALLY if you aren’t highly technical. Wordpress has many tools as well such as an exclusive SEO Package. Wordpress also allows you to involve social media such as “liking” your blog posts or “tweeting” your blog posts.

4. Utilize Inside Linking

This is a very easy, yet highly over-looked SEO tactic. When you are publishing a blog post on your website/blog, ensure that you have about 3-5 links from that blog post to other posts on your website. This is very much like link building and is great for SEO purposes. You can also link out to other websites, but the only issue you could run into with this strategy is if that link ever becomes broken.

5. Encourage Guest Blogging

When I say this I mean both offer guest blogging yourself, and encourage others to contact you to write guest blogs on your website. This is a great way to increase your outreach, build your network, and increase your increase website traffic. Usually when you guest blog, both the blogger and the blog work together to promote the guest blog which is extra exposure to your website/blog.

3 Tips to Optimize Your Pay Per Click Campaign

Pay per click marketing is a fantastic strategy for driving fast and targeted traffic to your website. You can narrow that traffic demographically and geographically, which is great for those businesses targeting locally. However, every pay per click campaign needs to be managed efficiently to ensure you are optimizing the campaign to it’s fullest potential. Check out these three tips to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck!

Pause Keywords That Under-Perform

When you choose the best keywords and key phrases for your pay per click advertising campaign, there are going to be certain key phrases that aren’t performing as successful as the others, and the best way to handle this is to simply pause those that aren’t performing as well. This will allow you to put that money spent towards the key phrases that are performing more successfully.

Conduct A/B Testing on Ad Campaigns

We all want to think that the one and only ad we design will attract our target audience and turn that audience into a successful conversion rate. However, that’s not how the real world operates. The best way to determine which ads are the most successful is to conduct A/B testing on each ad. You can experiment with words, images, links, and calls to action. This will allow you to determine which ad is most successful as attracting your target audience.

Optimize Your Landing Page

Now once you get the user to click on your ad, you want them to actually remain on your website and hopefully convert into a customer. You should be analyzing your bounce rates to determine how long visitors are staying on your landing page. You don’t want clutter, you want a very clear call to action on your landing page so the user knows EXACTLY what to do once they get there.

Hopefully this article has been helpful to you and if you have any further questions, check out www.LookSmart.com for more information on pay per click management.

3 Ways to Audit Your Pay Per Click Campaign

So many businesses, whether your small, medium, or large jump head first into pay per click marketing campaigns. Mainly because they just want all the traffic they can get to their landing page. However, if you aren’t getting any conversions from these millions of visitors, then it’s not doing much good for your business. Do these five steps to ensure you are getting the most from your pay per click campaign.

Analyze Your Campaign Structure

Just as if you were building a house, you need to ensure you lay the foundation of your pay per click campaign properly. Categorize your ads and ensure you are narrowing each ad campaign to a highly targeted audience so you’re not wasting your budget.

Analyze Your Ad Copy

Here you’ll want to ensure you are using keywords that will produce the highest conversion rates. You also want to ensure your ad copy is to the point and has an extremely clear call-to-action. For each campaign, you should be using 5 different ads all targeting the same keyword and then you can determine which ad is generating the most clicks and the highest conversion rates.

Analyze Your Landing Page

If you have the budget to do so, you really should test out 2-3 different landing pages to see which ones are the most successful with your target audience. You can play around with graphic design, opt-in/call-to-action, colors, and written content. Then after a few weeks, you can analyze the results to determine which landing page produces the most favorable results and increase website traffic.

We hope these tips on auditing your pay per click campaign have been helpful, and if you have any questions regarding your business’s pay per click campaign, feel free to reach out and contact LookSmart, Ltd.