So how do you choose the right keywords for your enterprise’s website? Depending on whom you ask, there are many ways to go about it, many online tools—Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery—that you can use, and a number of places to get started. But the important thing to remember is that no online tool or SEO expert knows your business as well as you do.

That’s why a brainstorming session should be a part of beginning an SEO or PPC campaign. Bring in everyone who’s important to your business and start talking; write down as many phrases as you can and don’t worry about repeating yourself or weeding things out just yet. Make a big, long list of all the ways people might try to find your site online.

Now you’re ready to turn to the tools, the online wizards, the keyword experts. They’ll help you figure out which keywords are most natural, most relevant, most specific, and most often searched. From there, you really can begin to realize the extent of keyword power.

These hints (with some liberties taken, of course) are excerpted from our white paper, Keyword Power: Optimize with Attention-Grabbing Keywords. To download this and other whitepapers, stop here and drop us a line.

Because customers are spending more conservatively, they are pickier about what they buy. This means that they might spend as much as a month doing research online about a product before making a significant purchase.  Because of this, it is important to maximize impact in online search and get products visible to customers in the purchasing phase of the shopping process.

Pay Per Click advertising, commonly known as PPC, is the best way to target customers in the purchasing phase. By using keywords targeted to specific products, listing competitive prices, and incorporating other measures to optimize a PPC campaign, you can maximize your impact in an online search by appearing to potential customers who are ready to buy.

This is particularly important during the holiday season, as getting ad campaigns ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday can mean the difference between ending the year in the red or in the black.

The pros for PPC are many. Here are just a few, from Network Solutions’ Winning Clicks guide:

• Calculation – PPC is easily measured. Marketers are able to get raw numbers within seconds. Return on investment (ROI) and cost per acquisition (CPA) are easier to calculate than for traditional print and broadcast advertising.
• Cost – You only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
• Speed – Everything about PPC is fast. The campaign can be running in less than a day
• Timing – You can set up your ads to only run when you want them to.
• Targeted – You can easily tap your target audience by using the proper keywords and ad copy.

Network Solutions has a series of whitepapers available to help small businesspersons navigate the world of search engine marketing. The guide to driving sales using Pay Per Click is just one of the resources available from Network Solutions. Download this helpful resource, and others, today, and learn the basics of PPC, as well as the specifics of working with a PPC provider, different types of conversions, and how to get a good return on your investment.

Pay Per Click (commonly referred to as PPC) is the major advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, content sites, and blogs. With Pay Per Click, advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website. PPC is a great way to attract new, targeted customers, and, if done right, can capture customers right as they are ready to purchase.

It can be tough to jump right into anything new, and PPC is no different. There are many factors to take into account in order to run a successful PPC campaign, and without search engine marketing experience, it can be very intimidating. For this reason, Network Solutions has created a series of whitepapers to help small business owners get started with the basics of their online marketing campaigns, and to learn more about the specifics that can spell out success.

“Winning Clicks: Everything You Need to Know About Pay Per Click Advertising” is Network Solutions’ primer on PPC, covering the pros and cons of choosing Pay Per Click and outlining the benefits of bringing in expert help to manage a successful PPC campaign. Those interested can download the “Winning Clicks” whitepaper here.

How does it work? The software monitors web activity 24/7 and converts that into improvements for the keyword selections & campaign performance. This new enhanced program also allows our customers 24-hour access to detailed daily campaign performance reports. This allows you to monitor & evaluate your pay per click advertising whenever you’d like.

Although our pay per click services were generating leads for our customers, we saw room for improvement. The improved PPC program also includes high level geo-targeting capabilities that will allow you to focus on specific geographic markets. Phone call leads have also been integrated into the pay per click management system that allow for call recording & detailed reporting of phone lead data. These additional features move the service into the PPA (pay per action) realm so that you can generate leads from emails, forms, landing pages & phone calls.

Knut Svendsen, Director of Product Marketing for Network Solutions explained, ““Although our current pay per click services were generating thousands of lucrative leads for our customers, we recognized the potential for improvement. Innovations like our new keyword optimization software will benefit all of our PPC campaign management customers, while other enhancements like our geo-targeting capabilities can help smaller businesses to use their PPC budgets with greater efficiency.”

This means that you must be on top of your game to make your web site accessible by search engines of all types so your Search Engine Marketing strategy must be a solid part of your overall marketing plan.

Many people talk about Search Engine Marketing in very loose terms but it is essentially separated into two parts – Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the free part of Search Engine Marketing. The goal is to earn top rankings in free search engines which are called “natural” listings. In this instance you work to optimize your site giving the search engines what they’re looking for so that it is listed properly improving your ranking and hopefully making the front page. There are a few tricks to making this work and I recommend hiring a consultant or service provider that can optimize your site properly. Trust me, it will be money well spent. Here is a well accepted process to maximize your SEO:

- Find the most relevant keywords for your market
- Plug those keywords into the headlines, subheads and body copy of your web pages but use them sparingly
- Get inbound links to your site through things like blogs. It is what the spiders love the most because it is “natural”.
- Keep the search engine “spiders” coming back with frequent new content. Blogs are a good example of this.
- Use a site map because the spiders take a top level link and dive deep into your web page indexing all of your web pages
- Don’t be dense with keywords or the search engine spyders will see right though it

It is important to note that while this is the most cost effective approach to getting your site traffic, it will take time. If you need traffic immediately, you will have to add Pay-Per-Click (PPC) to your strategy.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

If you have used a search engine, and I am sure you have, you have seen results that are up at the top or off to the side and colored differently than the standard results. That is because someone paid to get there. The way it generally works is that the search engine company has keywords set at a certain price for a level of “clickthroughs” or when people actually click on the link to get to your site. You can also use various web site provider packages to help you manage this effort. There are some advantages and disadvantages to this strategy.

Advantages

- Your web site shows up immediately in search engines which is great when you are really trying to do time sensitive campaigns

- It is a great way to test keyword effectiveness that you will want to integrate into your natural SEO strategy

- You only pay for the clickthroughs to your site

Disadvantages

- It can be costly because you might pick expensive keywords that are so hot your marketing budget could get blown right out the window

- Competitors can intentially clickthrough to your site making your costs go up, although this has been fixed by search engine providers to prevent fraud

Combining Strategies is the Best Way to Go

As time goes on, a strategy utilizing both approaches is the way to go. Over time, your site will increase its ranking in search results and you can reduce your PPC for direct and general keyword hits. This will allow you to use PPC for more targeted efforts like product launches and specific campaigns. Lastly, it is important to note that you should not rest on what you have done and keep your site fresh and relevant. Techniques and search engine algorithms are updated all the time as more people learn to “game” a certain aspect of the system.