Throughout my two and a half years blogging I’ve spent the majority of my time learning ways to increase my readership without having to dip into my pocket. This mainly consisted of hours upon hours spent in front of a computer screen reading search engine optimization professional’s blog posts. With the hopes I’d retain a little that I could than implement on my blog – which I was able to.
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Anyway, ever since learning my fair share about SEO I began to place a lot of weight on solely SEO for myself and clients marketing activities (because well: who doesn’t love organic traffic). Now, I’m not saying SEO is bad – in fact the industry has recently seen rapid growth (which would be impossible if it were bad). However, there are times which SEO isn’t feasible for whatever the reason.
In my case specifically it boiled down to my client’s company simply being unable to consistently push out content which could be search optimized and was specifically created for marketing reasons. This rendered my SEO activities useless to a certain extent. For about two to three weeks I stuck with it and attempted all I could for the company to increase organic traffic by the following:
- Guest Posting
- Cleaning up On-Page SEO
- and revamping the blog as much as possible
Seeing as how they all failed to a certain extent I knew it was time to venture out into another realm: PPC advertising. I figured factoring in the time it took me to create each unique post, pile in some back links and anything else it would be quite more expensive than running a $75/week Google AdWords campaign.
So I started the first campaign for the company. My assumption diving head first into AdWords was that it couldn’t vary that much from SEO as keywords played such a significant role as they do in SEO. Boy was I wrong.
As I soon found out the use of keywords in both of these marketing activities vary. In SEO I look at keywords for a couple of things: competition, and potential ROI – is the keyword relevant to product, the company etc. Are their major competitors targeting the same keyword? However, when it comes to AdWords keywords are a little more important. They dictate a couple of things: how much you’re be shelling out for your campaign (as keyword prices vary), who you direct competition will be (as they’ll probably be targeting relatively the same keywords and so forth. Don’t worry I’ll go more in-depth in a later article.
All in all though my overall experience with running a hardcore AdWords campaign has been quite fun and rewarding. I find that the visitors you bring in via AdWords ads are more likely to converted into customers due to the specific targeting AdWords allows that is simply impossible to accomplish via SEO. Above that I find it less demanding – you no longer have to worry about vanishing links, spam links, Google penalties etc. instead, you simply have to maintain your keywords and create some compelling advert copy.
Have you ran and AdWords campaign before? Have any tips for myself or readers – please do share! Drop a comment they’re all read and appreciated even the trolls.
