The most important strategy for both SEO or PPC is keyword research. Everything starts from there. There are definitely some similarities and differences in how you should approach keywords for SEO and PPC. First, the similarities:
- You need to take into account both potential volume (e.g. number of monthly searches) and competition
- Think about keywords and phrases that your customer base actually use and search for. Don't use industry lingo or marketing mumbo jumbo. Use plain English (or whatever language you're marketing in) and natural phrases
- Think outside the box. Don't just focus on the most common keywords. Think up ones that your competitors haven't thought of. A popular technique is misspellings and grammatical variations on popular keywords.
Now the differences:
- With PPC, there is no limit to how many keywords you can target. It's really a matter of your ability to track and manage them. With SEO, you can only target about 4 keywords for each page. So you need to be much more selective.
- With SEO, competition is a much bigger factor when choosing keywords. The more competitive a word, the more challenging it is to get rankings. With PPC, you basically know how much you need to pay to get a certain position, and anyone can be #1 for the right price.
- With SEO, seasonal words to be targeted need to be planned ahead of time. SEO takes much longer to get rankings than PPC. With PPC, you can capitalize on seasonal or hot topics almost immediately.
How do you do keyword research? There are many tools, both paid and free. Most marketers use a combination of both.
Until next time....
Movie Quote of The Day
From
Airplane!
Steve McCroskey: This fog is getting thicker.
Johnny: And Leon's getting laaaaarrrrrger.
