Search Engine Marketing (PPC)

PPC, or pay per click marketing, can provide an effective means of marketing your company. It works by creating ads, or posting your ads, on websites targeted to specific demographic groups or interest niches. It differs from print marketing because you pay not based on the space your ad occupies for the time it sits there, but rather based on the number of clicks the ad receives. In other words, only when someone actually acts on seeing your ad are you actually charged.

By itself, PPC can be an inefficient means of marketing. Average click rates for an ad are very low, and even when people click on an ad, there is no guarantee that they will go on to act. In fact, many businesses create ads that operate as “clickbait,” posting sensational information in the hopes that a high volume of clicks will lead to some sales or ad revenue based on further ads they place on their own website.

This approach misses the boat in two ways. First, a good ad can attract customers who are most interested in what your company provides. A well-crafted, informative ad can thus provide you direct benefit, with the added positive that you only pay for the times someone actually acts on them. Just as importantly, though, the ads provide outside links to your website. Backlinks from other sites can boost your reputation score in search engines, and accordingly increase your site rankings to give an indirect bump for your SEO marketing campaign.

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PPC Gives More Chances To Be Found

1st in SEO understands that an Internet marketing campaign works best when you run it on multiple fronts. When you focus all of your efforts in one area, even one as critical as your company website, you lose growth and outreach opportunities elsewhere. The most effective marketing takes advantage of those opportunities and layers different marketing techniques to let them work together.

PPC marketing works best when ads provide meaningful information themselves. Advertising language is necessarily tighter than your content pages will be, and thus their scope is limited somewhat compared to your website. But a well-written ad that lets people know who you are and what you do can gain page rankings in its own right. It provides one more means of connecting your customers to you and the content that they want to find.

To accomplish this, 1st in SEO focuses the PPC ads we create for you on targeted keyword phrases, researched carefully for maximum search volume to competition ratios. Your ads will mean something to your readers, so those who find them will be more likely to click, and then to act when they reach your website. We thus bring you traffic both with maximum reach of your ads and with maximum impact among those you reach.

Any Internet marketing works best when you interconnect information among different locations. We apply SEO techniques to your PPC ads as well as to your website and social media pages. Whether customers find your ads or your website directly, they find you. The connections this creates allow your site rankings to build more quickly and powerfully, thus getting you in front of even more potential customers.

PPC Lets You Test Content

An added benefit of this approach is the ability for you to test content among your potential customer base. Focus group testing can be expensive and inefficient, and it provides no direct benefit to your site rankings. But PPC marketing can serve the same purpose; it puts your content in front of people who can either act on it or not. You can measure the ratio of views to clicks, and clicks to purchasing activity.

PPC allows this to work better because of the limits of advertising language. A 1,500-word post on your website contains primary and secondary keywords of varying concentrations. You focus it on one topic area, but it necessarily covers other ground. And when you receive page views, you can never be completely sure what percentage of those views stems from one term or topic versus another. An ad, though, focuses almost exclusively on one topic or keyword phrase. If your click rate is high, you know why. You link out to your site with specific content referenced and terms applied. In doing so, you test your customer base for what people respond to.

1st in SEO works with you to perform valuable market research through PPC that increases your site rankings even while we research how to most effectively provide the best content to further increase those rankings. We want everything we do for you to carry the maximum potential impact for you, and we employ PPC with that same perspective.

Use Social Media to Target PPC

Of course, while letting your PPC multi-task on your behalf, we still work to make the marketing effective in its own right. We work to identify the best places to place your ads for maximum impact. Programs like Google’s AdWords use contextual algorithms to place your site on sites that should mesh well with your site. In this regard, we trust but verify; we will help you take advantage of these opportunities, but we also follow up to ensure that your ads are placed not only on sites that have complementary kinds of content and themes, but also represent you well. Placing ads on a poorly-written or poorly-designed page can harm your reputation online, so we monitor actively and help you get your ads removed from sites that might not reflect well on you.

An additional means of placing targeted ads is to use Facebook and other ad-savvy social media platforms. When you place ads through these platforms, you can target very specifically who will see them. You can define a demographic group, or a set of defined interests, or a regional area, with as much specificity as you like. This always represents a balancing act, of course; going too specific can limit your reach more than would make sense for an advertising campaign, but going too broad can get your ads flagged as spam by users with no reasonable connection to the kind of information you provide.

To find the appropriate middle ground, we will work with you to analyze your customer base—both your current customers and the customers that generally purchase products and services similar to what you provide. After all, unless you extend your reach beyond those already frequenting your business, you will never grow. Instead, we identify the audience factors that will likely lead to new customers discovering you, and target your social media PPC ads accordingly. We then develop your ad campaign by sending ads out to the customers within those factor groups. And as your potential audience grows, social media connections help you reach like-minded individuals in the networks of those who respond to your ads. This creates additional backlinks to your site, once again weaving site rankings growth with direct sales opportunities.

Measure, Test, and Redirect

The best planning still sometimes leads people and marketing campaigns astray. This goes doubly for marketing plans devised in the face of changing search engine algorithms and changing populations over time. Accordingly, planning ahead will only get you so far. Just like a good coach in sports, your SEO marketing firm must be able to adjust course when things do not go as planned.

Before you can make required adjustments, though, you need to be able to see and understand your reality. While we certainly have a feel for what marketing works and what does not, we rely on measurements to do this. If your PPC click rates decline or never register as marking an effective ad campaign, we see this right away and set to work determining how best to shift course. Sometimes this means your targeting has missed the mark, or the sites on which your ads appear do not mesh well with your company or brand. Other times, your ad language or the keyword phrase you target might not effectively inspire action from those viewing it.

We do not just view the PPC ad performance independently. As you develop your marketing, you should see a bump in your site rankings, and in the individual page views to which the PPC ads lead viewers. If this does not occur, it suggests your ads are not achieving their desired goals. Further, clicks that lead to your site but do not result in increased purchase activity once people find your site do not ultimately help you as much as they should. We look at both the ad performance itself and resulting return on investment to make sure you get the most out of your PPC that is available.

Whatever causes your PPC marketing to flag, we will help you get to the bottom of it. More importantly, we will make the changes required to help you return to achieving the maximum benefit possible from your PPC campaign. The process continues over time; we create ads, run them, measure their effectiveness, and adjust to improve. Only through continuous vigilance can we keep you on top of your PPC results.

Use 1st in SEO to build out PPC Strategy

At 1st in SEO, we are focused on getting, maintaining, and improving on the best results for you and your company. This extends beyond web design and content marketing to include all aspects of your Internet marketing. We will work with you to use all of the tools at our disposal to increase your site rankings, your conversion rates, and your revenue streams.

PPC marketing can provide a powerful tool for your arsenal, if you know how to use it. We will apply PPC to your campaign across your platforms, to both build up your rankings and lead customers directly to purchasing opportunities for your company. We design the ads and focus their delivery for maximum impact, and follow through to ensure that impact remains at its highest levels for you.

With 1st in SEO, you will find opportunities in places you never considered. Contact us today to start building your PPC plans and take your business to the next level.