Wow your website is now indexed and everything seems to be going well with Google. You have your articles written out, and each page is getting indexed within the hour of posting it.
You worked really hard on the landing page, and you’re constantly receiving quality links.
Everyday you’re religiously checking your rankings to see if you had an increase in the SERPs.
A few weeks pass by and one of your pages is now showing up on the bottom of page 1!
You tell your friends, coworkers, and even family members that you’re now on page 1, and you’re going to make a whole bunch of money.
A week goes by and you’re not receiving any visitors. You check all your stats and make sure all the analytic tools are working properly, and everything is in place.
You then search to see what percentage of visitors the #10 listing on page 1 receives the keyword. You see it’s a small percent, and say to yourself…”I need to rank higher so I can get more visitors!”
So you go back and build more quality backlinks, and within a month you’re now in the top 3!
Still….you’re not receiving any visitors.
You ask your friends to search the keyword just in case it’s not Google messing with you…and they’re all say you’re #3.
You now look at the description tag, and redo the tag to make it look at lot more enticing to get a higher CTR.
You wait a few days for Google to update your description, and in the meantime you’re building more quality links. You say to yourself “I’m so glad I took care of that description Tag. That must’ve been the reason why nobody was clicking”
Next week comes along and you search your keyword….and BAM YOU’RE #1
You remembered that the #1 listing receives over 40% of the search traffic.
You check your affiliate network site, and notice that you don’t have any sales. You check your analytics report and see NO INCOMING TRAFFIC. You call everyone to check your rankings and everyone says you’re #1, and that you’re an SEO genius. You start reminscing the day before you started working on the website, and how you made sure to use all the keyword tools to verify each keyword gets SEARCHED. You even went on the Google adword tool and made sure you clicked on ‘Exact Match’ for that particular keyword. Still no visitors….and now you feel like a SEO Loser and decide to try something a lot easier like Social Media. 😉
Has this happened to you? True Story. It happened to yours truly, but I already was some kind of Social Media Guru…we all are actually…
Nowadays, I use PPC before I start a new SEO campaign. PPC and SEO go hand in hand, and if you don’t use PPC you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns gives LIVE impressions, and gives me a quick idea if the keyword gets searched or not.
I still use the keyword tools to get a bunch of keywords (over 100) and I drop them all in an Adwords Campaign to get a real impression count. I generally run the PPC campaign for 1-2 weeks…or longer (will depend on the niche)
I optimize the campaigns so the keyword will show up on page 1 of Google, and I generally have the keyword on 5-7 placement for Adwords SO I WONT GET CLICKED ON. My goal is to collect data, not really to get clicked on.
Here’s an important note…
I run an exact match campaign and a phrase match campaign. Broad match campaigns will not give you the EXACT keyword until the ad gets clicked and Google shows the actual keyword. You’ll get thousands of impressions but will never know what the actual keyword is.
With Exact Match you will receive Exact Impressions for the Exact Keyword.
After 1-2 weeks running the Exact match campaign I’ll have an idea if any of the words in my keyword list gets searched.
David Kyle, a local internet marketing expert, mentioned that there were a few people actually using this technique. He advised to run a Campaign Report on your Adword Campaigns, and to make sure to click on the Impression Share (IS) & Exact Match IS in the column section when running the reports. It will give you a percentage of how many times your ad was shown compared to the overall impression count.
Now you don’t have to wait weeks or months to find out if you’re going to get any visitors for a keyword. You’ll be saving a lot of money, and a lot of time for your sites and your client sites. Nowadays, if a new client doesn’t want to run a PPC campaign for their site, I don’t work with them. It doesn’t make sense to build a site and anchor text around a keyword that will never bring visitors and/or business.
Robert Enriquez, Founder of Search Exchange, can be contacted at his SEO Company site, through twitter @NC_SEO.
