August 6, 2018

3.6 : PPC keyword vs organic keyword plan

3.6 : PPC keyword vs organic keyword plan

Dr. Aleksej Heinze, Associate Professor at KEDGE Business School (France), Visiting Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

When you’re developing your buyer persona content in terms of keyword research, you also have to bear in mind that there are certain ways that you would be able to target in pay-per-click advertising or PPC or paid way of advertising on searching engines, and there are other ways that you would be able to target in organic or search engine optimization and organic social media optimization as well.

All PPC networks, such as Google AdWords or Twitter or Facebook, work on a similar principle. But you have keywords that you want to specify and you can also target the radius of individuals where that particular ad would appear, and essentially you have a chance to really narrow down the individuals that will be interested in a certain content, and will be based at a certain period of time.

With the organic search engine optimization, you will not be able to be as specific. So therefore, keywords can be somewhat broader in the sense that you will not be able to specify a particular date or a particular event that is happening, and especially if you want to have that event on a very quick basis of results. But if an event if taking place tomorrow, and you were to create some content that is related to this event tomorrow, it is very difficult for search engines to pick it up and serve it as the number one event. Although it is possible, but still quite a challenge.

PPC:

+ offers precise and quick content presence

– as long as you have a budget

Organic Search and Social:

– you have less control and it takes longer to gather momentum

+ not reliant on budget and has longer term impact

So when you are developing your keyword research, bear in mind that the organic SEO and organic social media optimization has to be a more long-term, sort of strategic approach; think about 3-4 months, and the more short-term tactical decisions have to be going down the PPC route.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

We do not use PPC campaigns or invest PPC activity across Google. The majority of our time and our focus goes on search engines optimization. It’s producing relevant content that we can use for SEO purposes on different search engines, but we can also use that content across the social media channels and other marketing channels that exist for us, maybe at conferences or maybe at exhibitions, so that we can use different content across different elements.

PPC may not be appropriate for every business

A test campaign will suggest if it is worth investing in PPC

PPC is very specific, it can be costly, and it can be unsuccessful in terms of the investment that you put in, and therefore for a SME, it’s quite a big decision whether you want to invest in a PPC campaign because you need to ensure and be absolutely certain that those customers that are coming through to your website are converting purely because of your PPC listing. If you cannot get the tracking right on that, then it is a big question mark whether you should be using PPC activity on your digital marketing strategy.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

Pay-per-click you can use it on search campaigns, on display campaigns, or even in social campaigns. So, this means you will pay only if someone click your add and visit the website.

PPC has different formats including payment based on a pre-defined action and payment per impression

So, when you are looking for certain actions, it’s better to use pay-per-click campaignbecause there are other techniques like CPM only for views, paying for views, or even actions as we mentioned in the affiliation marketing.

Kristina Chokoeva, Marketing Director, DINO, Bulgaria

We integrate social media and search optimization into our mix of marketing activities. Our marketing budget is two-fold: 1) ads, initiatives, events which aim at raising more awareness of the brand and will eventually increase sales in the long run, and 2) ads which lead to immediate increase of sales.

For Dino, PPC drives sales so it is a worthy investment

About half our budget goes to social media and adwords because it drives sales up.

Exercises

Organic SEO vs PPC

A search engine’s business model is based on selling advertising space. Inevitably, if users don’t click on ads it becomes difficult for a search engine to survive – read this article that goes into the details of this challenge:

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2200730/organic-vs-paid-search-results-organic-wins-94-of-time

Additional materials

Organic SEO vs PPC

How can you sponsor a story on Facebook?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce3P79ktpTk

How to track Google AdWords conversion tracking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw-CBM6F9rU

Getting started with Re-marketing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLBRiaKih6Q

References

Google AdWords resources

 https://www.youtube.com/user/learn…

Facebook resources

 https://www.youtube.com/user/theof…

Twitter resources

 https://www.youtube.com/user/Twitt…

Pleae see chapter 3 links below:

3.0 Buyer persona development
3.1 The importance of understanding who the target audience is
3.2 Planning integration of search and social media
3.3 Keyword research for buyer persona
3.4 Social media channels for buyer persona
3.5 Develop keyword plan for a campaign
3.7 Develop social media editorial calendar