In the years that I’ve been doing SEO, I’ve never been excited about PPC. It seems like many SEO people feel this way and don’t spend much time doing PPC. There is a separation between those that love organic search and those that love paid.
However, if you are a serious SEO and aren’t using PPC before beginning SEO campaigns, then you are missing out on some valuable data.
So What Data Am I Missing Out On?
There are a lot of different ways you can use the PPC data for your SEO purposes, but here are a few methods of using PPC to get extra value out of your SEO campaigns!
Keyword conversion
One of the major mistakes I see new SEOs make is going after a keyword just because it has a high volume of search traffic. What if you end up ranking for that keyword and it doesn’t convert? The resources spent on ranking for that keyword might have been more valuable ranking for a handful of long tail keywords that convert really well.
Landing page optimization
How do you know which page is going to convert best for a given keyword? With SEO, you’ll spend a lot of time ranking a page, but what if that page doesn’t convert well?
If you start off using PPC to send traffic to a few variations of landing pages, you can find the right page to spend your time and resources on ranking. You would be surprised at the results of what pages convert better. When we ran a test for a health insurance client, we found that the home page converted 23% better than our landing page variations.
True search volume
While you can generally use the Google Keyword Tool for finding general search volume, if you run some PPC ads you can get an estimate of some actual traffic numbers you could potentially see. You can base the numbers for your extrapolation on any of the various studies that show what kind of CTR goes to the paid ads for any search result.
This data will help you decide if this is actually a keyword that you want to go after or not. And we all know, choosing the right keywords is incredibly important!
If you put a few of these practices into place before starting your next SEO campaign, you’ll have some very valuable data that will make it all the easier for you to get as much benefit as possible out of the traffic you receive.
