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Copywriter at Oakhouse Foods
14 November 2008 09:43am
Hi there
Can anyone advise me on this - is there a recommended number of keywords you should use in PPC as with SEO? I've just joined a company and part of my role will be SEO and Online PR but having reviewed the agency reports on paid search activity they seem to be using an awful lot of keywords (albeit spread across a number of different campaigns).
I am using the PPC activity to inform what I do with SEO although some things may need changing. Of course they need to tie in to one another don't they?
Any advice would be appreciated!
Thanks
Helen
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker
14 November 2008 12:47pm
hi, Helen,
No, they don't need to tie in exactly... a very rough rule of thumb would be:
This is mostly due to the way SEO is fundamentally tied to the page - the terms have to be on the page / in links pointing to the page. In PPC you can get away with related terms / synonyms to a much greater extent.
EG, In PPC you might have the following terms all pointing at one page:
Whereas in SEO, you'd have huge difficulty ranking a single page or all of those terms.
Instead, what you might do is focus first on the terms that are driving most volume & sales through PPC. Optimise the pages most likely to convert for those terms in natural, and then build up extra pages around them to target related terms.
Is that any use?
daniel
Director of Research and Education at Econsultancy
14 November 2008 13:18pm
Hi Helen,
There are no recommended amounts of keywords you should be using for PPC – it generally depends on the specifics of the campaign.
Each PPC campaign is different from the next, depending on the size of the company, the products or services being advertised, etc. so you need to understand your online objectives clearly. Having huge amounts of keywords may not necessarily be best, especially if they are wasting you money - but if they’re essential to a campaign then you should maybe look at the structures of the ad groups. (This can help make everything more manageable and you can quickly identify what’s working best).
Additionally, there’s lots of free software around that can make things easier, such as Google’s Adword Editor and various other keyword researchers/filters/cleaners around on the internet.
You’re right in thinking that PPC and SEO need to tie in with each other somewhat, as well run and successfully integrated SEO and PPC campaigns can be a powerful combination in driving traffic to a website.
I would also suggest that you have a look at our Paid Search Best Practice Guide.
Copywriter at Oakhouse Foods
14 November 2008 13:38pm
Thanks Daniel and Jake, much appreciated. I will take what you've said on board and see how I get on!
Helen
Director of ecommerce at Mezzo Marketing
14 November 2008 21:07pm
I think you need to look at what the product is. Where you are perhaps selling ONE product then the number of keywords and phrases would be limited. Where we are selling over 300 different funds, then there is a requirement to have several thousand key words.
The approach i would be taking is looking at your offline collateral and taking the key words, checking this with the campaigns your ppc agency have developed and making sure they are similar. The other thing that should be done is to look at competitors and once again check with the ppc campaigns
In short there is not an ideal number, it is about your products and chekcing this with the collateral you already have. It may be a good idea to get some impartial advice (not from a PPC agency) for a day and see what the expert says. Just a thought :-)
Chris
On 09:43:09 14 November 2008 HelenDeighton1 wrote:
Director at Browser Media
18 November 2008 15:14pm
I would suggest that looking at the number of keywords being used in a PPC campaign is a bit of a red herring - the key to successful PPC marketing is to ensure that the campaigns are delivering a healthy return.
If you can get a positive return on each and every one of a million keywords, then that must surely be better than refining the campaigns down to 100 keywords because you don't want to have too many keywords in the campaign?
Of course, most campaigns will usually have some star keywords that help boost overall performance of the portfolio and there is always a debate around certain keywords that may not perform as well but are often required for political reasons.
Just to pick up on something that Daniel mentions - "In PPC you might have the following terms all pointing at one page:" I would suggest that the ideal PPC campains would actually have landing pages tailored to each of the phrases you mention, rather than having them all point to one page. More work to do, but better quality score and likely to deliver better long term results... You are absolutely right though that this is a possible approach and it will be hard for one page to rank well organically for all those phrases but you could use PPC to drive traffic for all phrases.
Joe
www.browsermedia.co.uk
Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Naitonwide Building Society
19 November 2008 09:02am
Hi Helen
In terms of keyword volume I would recommend introducing as many relevant keywords as your current capability can handle. If you are managing campaigns manually then this will obviously be lower than if you use an either fully automated bid management system or a combination of automated and manual.
A good source of information to help you build your base is either Hitwise to undertake a gap analysis benchmark against competitor keywords. It is also worth engaging the marketing teams as they may have some nuggets of product information or customer insight that you can use and that your competitors may not have introduced.
With regards to the SEO activity I would recommend employing an SEO agency to undertake this but ensuring that whichever tracking solution that you use is integrated for both areas in order to accurately determine the substitution effect that switching off or reducing position for PPC has on the SEO results.
Alex