Balance is one of the most crucial aspects of health. Bodily health, mental health, and yes, even your marketing health. Finding the unique balance in your marketing strategy that brings you the most benefit can be challenging. Although you should never continue with a marketing avenue that isn’t “effective” for you, it is important to first define what that means. Whether you have a very broad definition or a very specific one, it is important to carefully define what the goal of your marketing campaign is, and then find the correct balance between several different strategies.

Marketing is not unlike a military campaign in that you analyze the territory, your opponents, and objective. Within this military operation, consider SEO as your infantry. It is what will get you through the war, the long haul. The infantry is the backbone of a great military, just as SEO is in a great marketing strategy. The bulk of your marketing can be accomplished through your SEO campaign, that’s what it is really good at, lots of traffic with a low cost per lead. However, if you want very specific types of traffic or leads, SEO is not always the best soldier for the job. Although SEO can get specific types and high quality leads, PPC marketing is like a precision strike. PPC is like your special forces. You utilize PPC when you have need of a highly targeted and qualified traffic and leads. Because PPC can be costly (depending on what you want to target), you only want to use it when and how you will get the best return on investment, because your paying for every visitor to your website. Again, PPC and SEO overlap in many aspects so they can be done individually with great success, but they work best when in cooperation. So, while SEO does a great job for most people even the most effective SEO campaign can be boosted by the addition of a PPC campaign in 5 ways.

1. Quality Leads – PPC utilizes a number of campaign features that allow it to specifically target users who are more likely to translate into qualified leads for you. With time and proper management, a campaign only gets more effective at narrowing in on ideal leads. As the campaign gets fine-tuned it also becomes less expensive and the cost per lead goes down, which is part of what makes it such a great lead generator. It allows you to have such control over the campaign that over time it becomes a way of picking out the cream of the crop, and not paying for any waste.

2. GeoTargeting – Within PPC you have the option to geotarget your campaign which allows you to not only show your ads to only people in a certain geographical location, but you can also exclude. So for instance, if you wanted to target all of Manhattan, but know that there are certain municipals within Manhattan that you don’t want to include, you can customize the campaign to exclude those specific areas. This is only one of many tools that allow you to customize the campaign and help target in on ideal leads, and is not something that you can do through an SEO campaign.

3. Branding – The key to branding is to be visible everywhere. The more you show up the more likely someone is to utilize your services. A lot of people look over the listings for things that stand out to them as appealing or relevant. Decisions are made in milliseconds, so it’s important to stand out. It is common for people to notice when a particular professional shows up multiple times on the search results page, and while they don’t always click on the first listing they see for that provider, when they see them a second time further on down the page it can often result in a click on that second listing. People associate multiple listings with relevance and success. So, if you have a PPC ad and an SEO listing on the first page, even if you get no traffic from the PPC listing it is absolutely helping your branding cause.

4. Testing – One of the hardest aspects of SEO is testing. Testing new keywords, content etc. The reason for this is because changes to SEO do not occur overnight. It can take time to see the results from changes made and that’s where PPC can come in very handy. Changes made to PPC campaigns manifest seemingly right before your eyes. You can usually see results within hours of making a change. So utilizing your PPC campaign as a way of testing out new landing pages, content, keywords, etc. can be a great way of harnessing the quick turn around of PPC for the benefit of you SEO campaign.

5. Show Casing – In marketing it is not uncommon to take advantage of current events or seasonal changes to promote an aspect of your business. And rather than make drastic changes to your website for only a short time, PPC can be effectively used to call attention to your business for a short-term purposes. This gives you the added benefit of moving quickly in promoting current events or seasonal campaigns. Getting a PPC campaign up and running takes significantly less time then making website and SEO changes that might not take hold before the campaign becomes outdated.

There are always pros and cons to any marketing strategy, and as a result it is vital to find what works best for your business. However, remember that what worked yesterday is not necessarily going to work tomorrow, so you need to be flexible and always look for a balance. Combining best SEO practices with PPC is a great strategy for achieving a balanced marketing strategy.

Occasionally we get asked why we don’t use mirrored sites when some of our competitors use them as a guarantee for successful PPC campaigns. Let me demystify the “power” of using mirrored sites for you.

First, what is a “mirrored” or “proxy” site? These two terms are synonymous with one another and describe a technique where the exact or nearly identical website is placed on multiple domains or subdomains. As a result, substantial duplicate content is created. Now that we’ve defined the technique, let’s look at some of the more common claims by companies that use mirrored/proxy sites:

• Mirrored Sites are the best way to get clean tracking for pay-per-click.  False

The claim is that by using a mirrored site you can point organic search to the original site, and paid ads to the proxy site. This will allow a clear distinction between what traffic comes to your site through paid ads versus organic search. The fact is, you can effectively track this data in many other ways such as landing pages, unique call tracking numbers, conversion code, and even segments of Google Analytics. There are also many third party software companies that offer highly advanced methods of tracking this data without requiring a mirrored website.

• Using a mirrored site is a common and acceptable form of marketing. False.

There are potential negative consequences to using proxy or mirrored sites for PPC and Organic. It’s widely considered a black hat technique, and furthermore, is clearly “SEO for the lazy person.”  Often we see companies scrape our clients’ website files without permission and place them on the proxied domain. Not only is it unethical to do this, and bad form professionally to not to ask for copies of site files, but it should also be a red flag as to the amount of effort a company is willing to dedicate to your marketing. Why should they take the time to come up with their own custom content and site equity when they can basically steal someone else’s work and place it on a new domain? If a web marketing company is taking your money but isn’t dedicated to doing due diligence to get you the results you deserve, I’d say keep looking.

• Duplicate content won’t get indexed if you use “no index, no follow” code to prevent the search engines from crawling the duplicate site.  False.

Some companies claim that there are no negative effects of using mirrored or proxy techniques as long as you include “no index, no follow” in the site’s code. The logic here is that if a Search Engine (SE) such as Google is told not to follow a link to the site and not to index it, then the SE will most certainly oblige the human’s request and the duplicate content will not be detected.  This is false logic. The truth is that no one can guarantee a site will not be indexed or followed simply by adding some code. The only way to absolutely prevent a site from being crawled and indexed is to encrypt it so that a user, including a SE spider, must enter login information to access the site.   While creating duplicate content is a larger issue related to proxy sites, there are other negatives to consider. For example, search engines don’t like this type of practice– they view it as cheating.

• Mirrored sites have no negative effects on your Ad words or Organic search engine marketing.  False.

In addition to the duplicate content issue, your Organic and PPC positioning efforts could be negatively impacted by this technique. Quality score for AdWords will likely take a negative hit if duplicate content is detected by the search engines. Since Google is highly capable of finding duplicate content, it will determine which domain of the two sites is more important to show up in the SERPs. This becomes particularly problematic when the SEs choose the domain that you don’t want to show in the results. This potentially undermines all of the hard work and effort put into your Organic optimization.

So, should anyone use mirrored sites? NO. Using mirrored sites is a bad idea, and is considered a black hat technique. While this method may work in the short-term, it is also an effective way to get both sites banned by Google and other search engines. While being banned is a worst case scenario, there is now plenty of data that shows the SEs merely choose to ignore proxy sites and give them no weight at all since it is clearly a poor choice of marketing technique. Why? Because in the simplest terms, it is cheating.

Today’s post, part of an ongoing series detailing ‘How Much Does PPC Advertising Cost?‘, covers how your Keyword List affects Pay Per Click advertising costs.  This post will elaborate on what exactly a Keyword List is, the settings that influence it, and how these two variables influence your Pay Per Click advertising expenses.  Let’s begin by clarifying what a Keyword List is, and what factors directly influence it.

A Keyword List is a collection of keywords related to your product or service that you want to use to advertise.  Each individual keyword is used to present your ads to corresponding, related search queries; and these keywords are each influenced by their keyword match type, Quality score and max Cost Per Click Bid.  Thus, your Keyword List is a collective representation of each and every keyword you’re using to prompt ad display.

The primary setting that influences a keyword, and subsequently your Keyword List, is the keyword match type.  Each individual keyword can be set to a ‘Broad’, ‘Phrase’ or ‘Exact’ match that regulates to what degree a keyword will present ad copy for comparable search queries.  At the ‘Broad’ setting a keyword will match up with a wide array of search queries that relate to the keyword and common variations, at the ‘Exact’ level the search query must replicate the keyword verbatim for an ad to be prompted.

The aforementioned keyword settings are used to regulate the degree of variation between search queries and keywords; as it becomes stricter your ad display (impressions) will decrease.  As impressions decrease so too will clicks, and this will in turn decrease your advertising costs.  Further, you can influence your Pay Per Click advertising costs through your keyword’s Quality Score, detailed here, and Max CPC Bid.  Each of these factors influences the average Cost Per Click and Average Position of your keywords.  As Quality Score increases your average Cost Per Click decreases, inversely as your Max CPC Bid increases so too does your average Cost Per Click.

In summary, a Keyword List is the collection of the keywords you employ to display ads via a Pay Per Click advertising platform.  The Keyword List represents the aggregate set of keywords and their associated settings, performance metrics and costs.  Any alteration to a keyword is reflected in your Keyword List and will influence your Pay Per Click advertising costs in a either direct or indirect manner.  To lower your monthly advertising costs you can decrease impressions by employing a stricter keyword match type.  Further, by increasing your Quality Score you can decrease your average Cost Per Click and indirectly influence your monthly expenses.

Today’s post, part of an ongoing series detailing How Much Does PPC Advertising Cost?, covers how your Average Position affects Pay Per Click advertising costs.   This post details:

• The exact definition of Average Position
• How Average Position is calculated
• How Average Position affects your Pay Per Click budget
• How you can successfully modify your Average Position.

Let’s begin by defining what Ad Rank and Average Position are so as to establish a common understanding of these terms.

A Campaign's Monthly Average Position

Within an account, each campaign, ad group, keyword, and ad-both individually and collectively when applicable- reports their Average Position.  Per Google, your Average Position ‘refers to the average position on a search result page that an ad appears in when it’s triggered by that keyword’.  The Average Position metric is transparent and informative, and responds to changes in an array of fields and time periods.  Further, you can drill it down to present the Average Position for a single keyword, or you can expand it to show the Average Position for your entire PPC campaign.

Average Position is based on this Ad Rank formula:

Ad Rank = Cost Per Click Bid x Quality Score

Of the two factors affecting Ad Rank, and subsequently Average Position, the Cost Per Click Bid is much easier to control.  A Cost Per Click Bid is set on a campaign, ad group or keyword level and simply reflects the Cost Per Click you’re willing to buy.  In contrast, the Quality Score is a much more elaborate and challenging factor that is based off a complex formula.

However, improving your Quality Score is the most direct, influential way to improve your Ad Rank and Average Position while simultaneously lowering your Average Cost per Click.  Some useful techniques and common practices for improving Quality Score as well as a wealth of other information are available in Kate Field’s series on Google AdWords’ Quality Score.

I’ll conclude by explaining how Average Position and Ad Rank directly affect your Pay Per Click advertising costs. Because Google AdWords, and for that matter nearly every Pay Per Click platform, operates on an auction based system, better ad position means you pay more per click.  As such, a higher Average Position results in a higher cost per click.  This increased cost is often worthwhile, but you need to make sure to constantly assess the increased cost per click costs with the added benefits of the increased visibility a higher position brings about.