Improve the Performance of Your PPC Campaigns

SEO Optimization for Improved Paid Advertising results

I often have people ask me, what do my organic rankings have to do with my paid search ads? Can’t I just pay for it instead? My answer is that organic rankings have everything to do with your paid ads. If it was as easy as shelling out a little extra cash to be number one, everyone would be doing it. More often than not you’ll end up paying top dollar for little in return. Here’s why, organic rankings take real work but what you stand to gain from that work will not only be a sizable increase in the number of users from your organic traffic, but you will also see an improvement in every ad campaign you create in terms of lower cost per click, how often your ads are served and how high you are ranked within the paid ads.

 

For example, many users believe that these are just bidding systems. As such, they treat it that way and just keep raising their bids higher and higher without seeing much improvement in sales and a huge increase in their advertising spend. What people in this situation are missing is that these types of CPA/CPC ad systems are algorithms first and then incorporate a bidding system into that algorithm. If you take the time to set up your pages correctly for organic rankings and optimize them properly, you will discover that you can rank higher and your ad cost will drop significantly over time. One of the reasons for this is what is referred to as Quality Score. When a search engine first looks at the page you are advertising, its software will determine if the page is relevant to the keyphrase you are bidding on. After some time has passed, customers will continue to click on your ads and it will continue to adjust your ranking and determine how much or how little your cost will be. Customers who click on your ad and stay on your landing page can either move forward to another page or leave your site for another competitor. This is called bounce rate and is one of the biggest factors of Quality Score. Bounce rate is used to determine how relevant the page is to the keyphrase a customer typed in to reach you. The number of users who click on your ad and then stay on your site, versus the ones that leave can determine whether or not you will have a successful campaign. The more customers that stay and go to the next page on your website the higher your pages will climb and eventually your price will decrease.

 

Remember, search engines do not mind taking your money if you are willing to spend it. Their main focus is to show relevant results on their search engine platform so that their users will continue coming back to them. If they didn’t, then they would soon be out of business. So showing relevant results on the search results is their number one goal. And it ought to be yours as well. How do search engines control this? It’s simple, if your ads campaign are irrelevant or have very little to do with the content of the page that you are bidding on then the search engines will increase your ad spend significantly to the point that you will either be forced to remove the campaign or your ads be pushed further back in the SERPs and your ads may end up showing less frequently.

 

Another very important factor in raising your Quality Score is pointing your ads towards the most relevant pages on your website for the keyphrase that you are bidding on. From personal experience, I have spent $0.10 on a keyphrase while my competitors who were bidding on the same keyphrase as me spent upwards of $1.00 yet I ranked higher than them. This happened in large part because I took the time to build relevant landing pages for each keyphrase instead of just using my homepage to send all of my paid ad traffic to. By having a unique landing page with relevant content your customers can become engaged and will spend more time reading your content. Customers who spend more time on your site can improve your Quality Score as well. Search Engine Journal explains Quality Score well: Why Quality Score Matters

 

 

Going back a few years I had a client who wanted to bid on the keyphrase 'Orlando hotels'. I told him that if he wanted to capture higher rankings for this highly sought after keyphrase he would need to improve his link juice to accomplish this. I explained to him that his landing page 'Orlando hotels' ' should be connected to other internal pages that were relevant to Orlando travel. Once he did this then he should link all of those pages back to the main 'Orlando hotels' landing page. This is one important way that link juice is created. Link juice is important for building relevance because the value passed from one page to the next helps search engines understand the purpose of your website. In addition, by doing this it allows your customers to discover additional relevant content therefore reducing your bounce rate and improving your overall time on site which is needed to improve your overall site rankings.

 

When you are setting up your paid advertising campaigns you need to use the right landing page to be successful. While this part is easy to implement, what most advertisers do not realize is that what landing page you use from your website can determine whether or not your ad campaigns will be successful. Having your customers land on your homepage is not only irrelevant in most cases but can hurt how you rank and cost you more. One example is if you are an affiliate reselling hotel rooms on your website. If the keyphrase you are bidding on is 'Orlando Hotels' then having this campaign land on your homepage is not advisable. You should have it land on a page showing content just for Orlando with a unique url, for example, https://www.your-domain-name/orlando. If this does not make sense, imagine bidding on thousands of city keyphrases that all land on your homepage. Do you think that your customers will be encouraged to book with you if there are thousands of other affiliates and aggregators reselling the same hotel rooms in the same city? Now imagine your customers landing on a page filled with hotel rooms in Orlando to choose from along with relevant images, useful content and resources that link out to other websites about Orlando. This is how many paid ads services view your page as well, and you will be rewarded with higher rankings and a much lower cost on your bids over time. So you can see why optimizing your website for organic rankings can benefit your paid ads, it is much more than just a simple bidding system.