SEO Pay Per Click Basics

Pay per click campaigns are  advertising campaigns that run on search engine result pages. You can use various programs, such as Google AdWords or Yahoo PPC Ads. It might seem a bit intimidating at first, but here are a few steps to get you started on your pay per click process.

Key Word Selection: Picking the right keywords is extremely important and is the first step in the PPC process. For this step, you can pick keywords that directly relate to your service or product. To help generate effective keywords you can use programs such as GOOGLE, Yahoo, or wordtracker. If the words you chose aren't specific enough, you can face a big loss. The goal is to generate useful and relevant traffic, so it is important to understand the product or service that is being offered.

Bidding Strategies: Where your ad gets placed depends on the amount you offer each search engine for that word. The higher the bid, the higher position you will have. There are a number of tools that can help monitor the numbers, and even adjust bids, which include: Atlas One Point, BidRank, and PPC PRO. It is highly important to constantly monitor campaigns and test how well your process is working. Ideally, a campaign should be monitored 4 times a day for at least 1 month.

Advertising Text: Having more than 1 advert is essential. You should make at least 3-4 adverts and use them at different times while observing their effectiveness. You want you ad to stand out from other competitors. People tend to mention discounts, offers, and special deals for the text, but you must have something informative in your text. After all, that is the reason they are searching the internet.

Develop Proper Landing Page: A landing page is ultimately more important than anything else.  If you are not sure what a landing page is, it is simply a web page designed for a keyword or related groups of keywords. They landing page and the advertising text needs to be relevant and consistent with the claim made.  This is where the visitor is asked to take an action. Relevance and consistency are important for your PPC campaign to be successful. People don't want to be taken to an irrelevant site or to a homepage directed towards a broad audience. If you give people what your ad promised, there is a higher chance of converting them to customers. To make your landing page the most successful it can be, you can try trail runs. For instance, have 3-4 different links with different landing pages, and see which one produces the best results.

Tracking: This is the last step, but not at all the least important. Optimization also plays a key determinant in the success of your PPC campaign. You need all of the data regarding your performance that you can get. Some tracking tools that can help you with this step include Webside Story's Hitbox Professional and Hitbox Enterprise.

Tip: Balance is important! All of the steps should be followed and go hand-in-hand if you want your PPC campaign to be successful.