Issue #017- Using PPC for Effective Keyword Research and When to Hire a Specialist

Written by Scottie Claiborne © 2005

There is a great book that I strongly recommend you read- although short and sweet, it packs a powerful message- do what you do best. FOCUS on do what you do best. Soar with your Strengths. It starts with a little fable about the Animal School, and how the squirrel's teachers decide he needs to spend more time learning to swim, since he's already good at climbing. In the end, he's still a poor (and demoralized) swimmer and a mediocre climber. His potential to be the best climber in the forest was sidetracked by focusing on the things he did poorly.

We as humans seem to think we should be good at everything; if a child excels at drawing but struggles with math, we tend to give them more tutoring in math instead of nurturing the artistic talent. That struggle to be good at everything comes at a price. We often block ourselves from truly excelling at something by thinking we have to be able to handle every task involved with it.

Specialists Do What They Do Best

I had a plumber come out to the house last week to find out what was causing the dark stains on the ceiling. He found a leaky vent pipe in the attic and fixed it. That didn't help me with the existing damage to the drywall in the ceiling, though. Just because the leak caused the ceiling problem and the plumber could recognize the problem, it didn't make him qualified to fix drywall. He was able to fix the source of the problem, but not everything it impacted.

When it comes to your website, it pays to find professionals who do what they do best. We are becoming a culture of "one-stop-shops"; we want to pick up our prescriptions, dry cleaning, movie rentals, milk and eggs in the same place. Why not? It saves time.

With web professionals, it's a lot harder to find a one-stop-shop; even large multi-disciplinary firms have weaknesses. Most companies- from one-person setups to huge conglomerates- have a focus and a selling point; something they do better than most or all of their competition. There might even be many things they do well. But chances are there are some tasks they handle out of convenience, simply because people have asked them to take care of it or it's another source for profit. That doesn't mean they know how to do it right.

Outsourcing is a Smart Option

Companies that recognize their weaknesses and strive to give the most value to their clients often outsource work to qualified professionals. However, sometimes it's simply outsourced to more inexpensive labor.

Find out if your web professional is outsourcing all or part of your project; if they are using trained professionals they are likely to use that as a selling point and a benefit. No matter whom they use, the results reflect on their company.

Can You Do It All?

If you work on your own website, assess your own strengths. Does your site look great but lack compelling copy? Does it show up well on the search engines? Are you a little lost when it comes to ideas for getting more sales or making your site more useful? Some of the professionals you might consider hiring would be:

• Web Designer

Often asked to do anything and everything for a site, from planning and implementing to marketing, most designers are really best at… designing.

A good design can make or break your site, so it pays to hire someone who understands your style, your goals, and understands the basics of web site usability.

• SEO Copywriter

This professional is the most-often overlooked member of the team. Many people decide to "save money" by doing the writing themselves, because after all, anyone can write, can't they?

This error is often compounded by poor SEO advice. Suddenly, a page that was just mediocre moves to terrible as keywords are stuffed into every sentence.

A good SEO copywriter can write copy that sells AND ranks well and typically, the investment in good content is repaid over and over throughout the life of the site.

• Search Engine Optimizer

SEO isn't rocket science, but if you don't have time to learn it and keep up on what is going on with the engines, you are often better off hiring an SEO. Editorial (or organic) rankings are a powerful marketing tool and much of the "old" advice out there simply doesn't work anymore (if it ever did!)

If you are a do-it-yourselfer, consider hiring an SEO simply to consult with you on a regular basis and make sure you are headed in the right direction.

• PPC Manager

PPC is one of the fastest-growing and highest-ROI marketing channels available today. Even small businesses can take advantage of PPC and simply run until their budget is met.

To ensure you are getting the most out of every click, consider hiring a PPC manager to set up and monitor your campaign- more often than not, the money they save you will pay for their fees several times over.

• Link Building Specialist

You can't rank well without links! Getting those links is a time-consuming process that can literally eat up hours of your day for very little results.

Consider hiring a professional link builder; they know the most effective places to get your links and can save you hours of ineffective work.

• Programmer

For custom applications and other programming needs, consider looking outside your web designer, who may have enough basic skills to do what you need but can't manage the long term growth of an application. Building an app right from the beginning is a lot less expensive than tossing it out and starting over later.

• Usability Analyst

When things just aren't going as well as you expected, you should consider a usability analysis. Usability analysis typically covers marketing, desirability, technical, and mechanical issues of your site and can uncover obstacles that are keeping your customers from finalizing their purchase.

• Statistical Analyst

A thorough review of your webstats can tell you a lot about your site; where visitors are coming and where they are leaving, how many pages they view, and at what point they abandon the shopping cart among other things. A detailed review of several months of web statistics can point out opportunities to improve as well as major obstacles that could be tripping your visitors!

Often one of these specialists can recommend other professionals if you need them. Our plumber was used to seeing drywall damage and gave us a referral for a drywaller instead of offering to fix the damage himself.

Articles, newsletters, and forums are great for learning the basics of successful websites but often their greatest use is in helping you to know what to look for in a professional. If your livelihood depends on your website (or you'd like for it to) know when to get professional help. The cost of a professional is often far less than the revenue you lose by not hiring them.

Focus on those things you do best, and hire others who are the best at what they do to make your site really succeed. After all, if you are a squirrel, shouldn't you be perfecting your climbing skills instead of learning to swim?

Scottie Claiborne is the Web Marketing Strategist for Right Click Web Consulting and the facilitator of the Successful Sites Newsletter. She is a speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences and the High Rankings Seminars as well as the administrator of the High Rankings Forum.

Written by Shane Pike, © 2005

If you've been around web marketing long, you know how effective Google AdWords can be at getting lots of qualified traffic to your site. But did you know that it's also a very powerful keyword research tool? If you know how to use it, there's not another resource today that provides capabilities as rich and as accurate as AdWords.

Bob's House of Rocks

To show you what I mean, let's look at a fictional company called Bob's House of Rocks. Bob's is a full-spectrum supplier of rocks large and small for use in building or as ornamental pieces. He can service just about any area of the country, so he wants to get as much free traffic as he can from search engines.

Ahh, the power of Broad Match

Bob probably already has a pretty good idea of what keywords people use when they're searching for what he provides, so he uses that list as our starting point when setting up his AdWords campaign - using Exact Match and Phrase Match where they make sense.

Here's the problem, though: Bob's competitors probably thought of roughly the same list. We tend to think like business owners, not like searchers. How does Bob find those high-traffic, relevant keywords if he can't just think them up? Broad Match.

Bob adds a handful of general terms to his campaign as Broad Match keywords, enough to be reasonably certain that he's covering any possible relevant search. In a few days, the keywords he missed will magically begin floating to the top - in his web server logs.

Panning for Gold

Every time a searcher clicks on an ad triggered by one of Bob's Broad Match keywords, Bob gets an entry in his web log. The "Referring URL" section of that entry is where the missing keywords appear. It looks something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=rocks+for+sale+&btnG=Google+Search

See the "q" parameter in the query string? That's exactly what the user searched for that triggered Bob's ad. In this case, it was "rocks for sale." By aggregating all the referrals from Google and grouping them by the keywords used, the missing keywords begin to reveal themselves. Bob may also find entirely new subject areas that lead him to add new Broad Match keywords.

Refine, Refine, Refine

As he finds common search terms that he hasn't previously accounted for, Bob creates Exact Match entries for them in his AdWords campaign. This allows him to better refine the cost-per-conversion for those individual keywords rather than having them all lumped together under Broad Match.

And most importantly for his search engine optimization efforts, creating Exact Match keywords allows him to see exactly how many searches those terms get relative to the others in his campaign and to see how well they convert.

Eventually, he gets his keyword list as refined as necessary. He's fairly certain that he's capturing all relevant searches now, and he's separated out all the popular keywords and left the rest grouped under Broad Match. It may take anywhere from a few months to a year or more to get it 100% complete, but the highest-traffic terms should appear fairly quickly.

Optimizing the Site…Finally

It took some time for Bob to get to this point, but it's well worth it. Once he has his keyword list fairly complete, he can begin to use his Exact Match keywords to determine exactly which terms he needs to optimize his site for. It's not enough to just look at which keywords get the most searches, though. He needs to calculate just how much a #1 ranking is worth for each keyword.

Let's take the terms "rocks for sale" and "stone for sale," for instance. According to his AdWords stats, the term "rocks for sale" gets 20,000 searches per month and converts at 1%. The term "stone for sale" only gets 10,000 searches per month but converts at 4%.

So, if Bob ranked #1 for "rocks for sale" and got an 80% click-through rate, that would result in an extra 160 sales per month. If he ranked #1 for "stone for sale," his sales would increase by 320 - even though "stone for sale" actually had fewer searches.

The two terms might have significantly different sale amounts as well. If so, that would also need to be factored into the equation.

Accurate Keyword Research with No Guesswork

The true power of AdWords is that it tells us with absolute certainty which keywords are the most valuable for a given site. Once the guesswork is eliminated, we can then set to work making sure the site ranks as well as possible for all those terms - focusing most of our time on the most valuable. No other tool gives us the same results as quickly and as accurately as AdWords.

Shane is a jack of all trades and master of…well…one or two. He is the founder and principal of Three:Twenty Interactive, a full service Internet consulting firm, and has been providing web development, traffic generation and site effectiveness services since 1995.

Wrap Up

Party Time in San Jose

It's that time again- the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. The warm weather, the search engine parties, the huge turnout of search engine geeks... I mean... professionals... who have arrived in search of knowledge and free drinks.

I have to skip SES this August, but that doesn't mean you have to! By all means, get your tuckus out there and party like it's 1999. I believe Jill Whalen will be giving away a free pass to one of her High Rankings Advisor subscribers, so if you want to go and you don't want to pay, write Jill your most charming email and maybe she'll pick you to go! (You do have to arrange your own transportation and accomodataions though, so make sure you can actually go before applying for the free pass.)

The World Needs Another Search Engine Blog

Doesn't it? Actually, it doesn't, but my good friend Michael Motherwell (otherwise known as ProjectPHP) and I were bored and we put up one of our own! You can find it at In Search of Stuff and we have just a few entries, but they are kind of fun if you follow the search world. I thought the dicussion on the sexy side of SEO was very enlightening. Of course, you can see we had to share this brilliance with the rest of the world.

That's all I have- see you next edition! -Scottie

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