An interesting question from Matt Re: how to organise the different promotional stages of a site!
Hi Kirsty,
I’ve been beavering away building a site and now I have been rummaging
around on the internet thinking about the best way to start promoting a new site.
From what I have read it seems there are 2 distinct approaches – PPC and
SERPS traffic.Since you seem to be one of the few that uses both I was
wondering how you decide which to focus on during the lifecycle of a site?
From my (newbie) perspective it would seem that PPC initially then shift
focus to the SEO/linkbuilding is the way to go…is this how you approach it?
Many thanks,
Matt
Well, the reason I moved into SEO was that I was sick of having to churn
and burn my PPC domains because my affiliate content was too thin and
kept getting slapped by Google. I sat down and worked out what I
thought the landing page algo would need to keep my pages up there long
term. I realised that it’d be hard work, but that as I was going to
write lots of unique content and provide good information resources
anyhow I might as well go for SEO and PPC traffic at the same time.
So in answer to your question, I always try for both right from the
start. The PPC gets things kicked off whilst I’m getting inbound links
and the search engines are doing their stuff. I also use SEO data to
feed new keywords into my PPC campaigns and PPC data to direct my
content strategy as that tends to reveal very quickly “where the money
is at”. Usually SEO traffic turns up quite quickly too, it doesn’t take
you more than 4 to 6 weeks to bring in 20% of your traffic in this way
which if you have targeted things properly makes a huge difference to
your profit margins.
September 18th, 2009 at 11:10 am
I found that when I started a bit of PPC it made me more effective at SEO – because I was better at targetting converting phrases with my SEO efforts whereas before I was more focused on any traffic through the SEO.
September 19th, 2009 at 4:03 am
If you are an online retailer – use SEO to make sure you rank well for generic terms that define your market – this helps you get traffic from people early in the sales funnel (those researching, but not yet ready to buy), then use specific, long tail keywords that matches the products you sell to get them when they are ready to buy
September 19th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
This depends on the product your offering and the commission you recieve.
PPC is the way to go if you can cover the cost with your affiliate income.
SEO is much better, it’s free and although it takes a little longer to recieve hits and commissions your website should build a good reputation.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:29 am
Thanks for all the additional comments and help guys!
October 5th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
PPC and SEO should work together. Whether you are optimising a web-page for Google quality score or for a Google SEO-bot, you should be pushing for the same goal and using the same optimisation-type rationale.