Pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing
Yes, free clicks are great, but having the skills to buy clicks for half of what your competitors pay is also an advantage. Furthermore, experimentation with pay-per-click optimization will give you tremendous insight into organic search engine optimization, as you can almost instantly see what Google likes and doesn't like about a website. Because of this, doing well with free search really requires at least some PPC practice.
The good news is that if you've done well with your SEO so far, then your PPC search engine marketing efforts should be that much easier. To get started, remind yourself of Google's motivations: to display highly relevant ads, to link to high quality content (better user experience = repeat Google user), and to get more visitors clicking on ads which will result in higher total revenue for Google. The way Google "encourages" advertisers to help them reach this objective is by rewarding you (the advertiser) with lower click cost when you create ads that get clicks, and landing pages that satisfy the user. Yahoo! (no, not Yahoo!). In short, you should consider these 3 main factors when using Adwords: bid amount, clickthrough rate (relevancy of your AD title/text/url to user's search), and landing page quality (primarily landing page relevancy to user's search). Here's a good video to watch from Google's head economist that explains things in greater depth:
In short, by providing a high quality ad (matching the keyphrase that you're bidding on) and a high quality landing page (relevant to the keyphrase), you'll pay a lower cost-per-click than competitors who are not as targeted as you are.
The search engine marketing tips tips on the next two pages assume that you are somewhat familiar with the Google Adwords service (you have an Adwords account setup, know what an "adgroup" is, etc). Complete newbies might want to start on the Adwords site itself.
Optimize your adgroups for keyphrases
Years ago, the strategy on Adwords was to start an advertising campaign by entering hundreds of keywords, watch the clickthrough and conversion rates, and then slowly weed out the non-performing keywords. It was a piece of cake for advertisers, but certainly didn't serve Google's goal of providing highly relevant ads.
Today's search engine marketing strategy is almost the reverse. You should create separate adgroups for each set of keywords that you want to bid on. For example, if you want to bid on "keyword1 keyword2", create an adgroup with just those keywords. Then make sure that you ad title and ad text includes those keywords, and that either your domain or URL includes the keywords (e.g. www.keyword1-keyword2.com or www.YourSite.com/keyword1-keyword2/ ).
This may sound like a lot of work, but staying on top of the results and paying less than your competitors for clicks will require it.
Alternate domains for Adwords searche engine marketing
In
the organic (free) search discussion, we mentioned the value of a keyword-laden
domain name to search engine optimization. This is even more true if you're
doing paid search, like Adwords. Having a domain name that matches your target
keyphrase almost always improve clickthrough rates, which leads to a lower cost
per click. And don't be afraid to buy some domains with dashes between words,
as they can actually increase readability and clickthrough rates further (they're
also more available). You can simply setup the DNS of each domain to point to
your primary domain.
If you're familiar with PHP or ASP, you can even customize the content of your homepage or landing page to match the domain name visited. This makes the creation of multiple landing pages for Adwords much easier.
Again, for organic search engine optimization, you should continue concentrating your efforts on just your primary domain, as Google doesn't like to index duplicate content.
