It’s becoming harder and harder to find meaningful data on organic search from Google. But one of the few data resources they do still maintain is their keyword data. Whether this is due to their obligations to their primary revenue stream, advertisers, is anyone’s guess, but the data is there.
But even though it’s the same keyword data we collect for PPC and SEO, the way search engine marketing practitioners use the data is completely different. Concerns such as competitiveness, various measures of success and the subtlety of the practice differ greatly between the two. Below we explore some PPC and SEO tips.
Objectives
You need to try and formulate what your specific goals are for your keyword research. The goals for any SEO or PPC campaign should never be generic, but should be planned to be company specific.
SEO
A tip, when researching on a given topic or product set: you are essentially trying to understand how people in those markets use keywords when searching. The more you understand about the structure of their keyword use, the better idea you’ll have on how to structure your content around them.
PPC
Keyword research in PPC are a lot more scientific. You should employ various financial measurements to establish return on investment and what kind of budget your campaign is comfortable with. Strict performance metrics should also be established.
Application
How the keyword research, and its various accompanying figures, will be used directly impacts how it will be collected.
SEO
Keywords should form the basis for your entire website. From the page title to h-tags, page content to URLs, you want to structure your website around it so has a strong connection with the subject matter. It’s a far more comprehensive process.
PPC
Obviously, the actual keywords will be used in your PPC campaign. The Ad Word groups however, should be used in both your ad copy and the landing page for the advertisement. If there is a large disparity between the keyword and landing page content, your Quality Score will begin to drop.
Analysis
Managing your expectations is an important part of business. A search engine marketer need to realise that these two types of internet marketing deliver completely different results in completely different timelines.
SEO
SEO is a long term activity. You likely won’t see results after a few days and teaching Google to trust you can take time. Another problem is that many ranking factors are just calculated guesses. We have no scientific way of knowing how these interact and what exact weight they hold. All you can do is test and analyse. Eventually, you will find a balance that works for your site.
You don’t have to be as wary of competitiveness on keywords though. Even if they are highly contested for, you won’t waste resources optimising for them. If anything they will further reinforce some of the similar but less popular keywords you currently optimised around.
PPC
PPC is a much more results driven effort and geared towards driving conversions in the short term. You can almost directly measure what each attempt-to-sell costs with simple things such conversion/clickthroughs or your bounce rate. Each of these can tell you what element of your offering is lacking.