Using Pay-Per-Click to Drive Organic Search Strategies

Before you spend a lot of time and money optimizing your website for keywords that you think users may be searching for, run a pay-per-click campaign and study the data. Start with Google’s AdWords program. Google has the best tools and the largest reach.

For example, I have a client who wanted to be ranked in the natural search results for a few dozen highly competitive terms. By running a PPC campaign for a couple of months (with thousands of potential keywords), we discovered that, while those original keywords did drive traffic to the site, those visitors did not convert to customers. They were ‘researchers’, and ‘browsers’, but they weren’t ready to buy.

Through our testing, however, we discovered hundreds of keywords that did convert visitors into customers. We immediately changed our focus to target those terms instead. The small investment for PPC testing was returned to us 10-fold within two months and the site is now ranking in the natural search results for those high-converting keywords.

I can think of no other advertising medium where you can do this sort of real-time testing in a real marketplace and receive feedback almost immediately. It’s priceless.