What is the difference between PPC, SEO and Paid Inclusion?

There is a big difference between natural or organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click (PPC), but many don’t know about it or don’t understand it.

Organic is “free” traffic, in a sense. Organic’s only cost is the  labor put in to optimizing your site. Pay-per-click traffic costs you labor plus the cost of a click. That is, you are charged each time someone clicks on your ad.

This shows the search results for a random term "topaz jewelry".

Key

• The red areas are pay per click.
• The purple area is organic search.
• The green area (shopping results) is referred to as “paid inclusion”; it is managed through Google Base. This is usually managed by a feed. It is fairly cost effective, but you have very little control over when and where your products are shown.

Using Your URL, Breadcrumbs and Navigation to Improve Quality Scores.

Due to the importance of quality scores in PPC advertising it is imperative that campaigns and adgroups be laid out in a logical order. One of the ways that the quality score is calculated is by examining the similarity between the keywords in any ad. Thus, if you sell shoes and boots you will need to have separate ad groups for each. Even if you only sell shoes, there are many different types of shoes, so we don’t necessarily want to put all our “shoe” keywords in the same adgroup.

While it is easier to stick all keywords into one ad it is not cost effective. Your ROI will be lower because you will pay more per click than a person who segments their ads. High quality ads are rewarded with lower costs per click.

Each of the Big three pay per click companies (MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and Google Adwords) use quality score as a way to reduce your cost per click. Most second-tier search engines use quality score as well.

Creating PPC Campaigns
Sometimes it can be hard to think of a logical way to create adgroups, especially for those new to PPC or for agencies that are working with a company for the first time. Here is one technique that I use that is very helpful:

Imagine that you have a client or you are a company with thousands of SKUs, across several verticals, like Bestbuy.com. If I was asked to start their campaign from scratch, it seems like a very daunting task. So where would I begin? I would look at their websites’ navigation.

Selecting and Ordering PPC Campaigns
Just like PPC advertising, one of the aspects of good website design is grouping products into a logical order. Taking a look at the top-level navigation shows us the categories that the company uses to separate their products.

I would start by creating a separate campaign for each of the top level categories. TV & Video would be 1 campaign, “Audio” would be another campaign, etc. (The TV AND Video is a hint that these might be two individual categories as well. So I would create one campaign for TV and one for Video.)

Think of campaigns like the departments in the store. If the campaigns are the departments then adgroups are the rows. Keywords are the products.

Selecting and Ordering Adgroups
I want to select adgroups that are quite narrow so as to keep a high quality score. How narrow? For a large store like Bestbuy this can be a little tricky. The adgroups will consist of groupings that are smaller than campaigns but larger than keywords. Where can I find information on a big site like this?

Once again we are helped out by the fact that Bestbuy is a well-designed site.

Take a close look at the “breadcrumbs”:

The furthest down on the navigation level will always (usually?) be the product (or service to buy or product to download, etc). The trail of breadcrumbs shows the path we used to get from the category which is the most general group to the product. The levels in between the product and the category are good candidates for adgroups.

If a site doesn’t have breadcrumbs you might be able to use a similar “trick” by looking at the product URL. A site that does this well is Calloway Golf. Here is the URL for product called an “X tour Wedge”; a type of gold club:

http://www.callawaygolf.com/Global/en-US/Products/Clubs/Wedges/X-TourWedges.html

Keyword: X tour wedge
Adgroup: Wedges
Campaign: clubs

Keywords
If you have used the method I have described, this is the easy part. By that I mean, you will now know where to put those keywords you have been wanting to bid on!

In summary, these are not necessarily the recommendations I would recommend to Calloway or BestBuy, but this provides a useful starting point for tackling a large project. Using a websites’ navigation, breadcrumbs and URL are great tools to help create your PPC campaigns achieve high quality scores.

Text and Links are the Fundamental elements of SEO

Search engine optimization is complex, but it essentially consists of two fundamental elements:
1) Text
2) Links

For CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, this knowledge is probably all you need to converse with your search marketing department. Of course, it always helps to understand the “why”, and after reading this article you will be caught up.

Small business owners and SEOs must know more; but sometimes, in our chase to solve the mystery that is The Search Algorithm, we lose site of the fundamentals and goals. It is always good to be reminded what is important.

Concentrate on link building and adding text (or “content”) and you will improve the visibility and rankings of your site.

Why are links one of the two most important factors in SEO?
Links are an important part of SEO because of Google. Originally, Google’s Algorithm was based primarily on the following concept:
1) If site A has more inbound links than site B it must be “more popular”
2) If page B has more inbound links on it than page B it must be “more popular”

In Google’s collective mind, more links and more popularity equaled a more reputable page.

I am using the past-tense, because Google now uses links as only one of many factors that determines what site will show up number one in the search engine rankings. Supposedly there are over 200 variables used to in Google’s formula, though The Formula is a closely guarded secret.

Why is text one of the two most important factors in SEO?
Think about the act of “googling” or searching for something. You are typing words (text) into a form and telling a computer to “go find sites that have these words”. You are not drawing a picture, making a sound or downloading your memory (though that would be cool). Thus, a search cannot find pictures and sounds and videos unless they have corresponding text.

This is why your site with pictures (and only pictures) of cyclones is not ranked #1 for “cyclones”. The search engines just see that you have a picture file.* If you want your site to be search engine friendly, a good rule of thumb is to stick some text on your site.

*There are advanced techniques (beyond the scope of this article) that you can use to get around these problems. Speak to your SEO expert.