Using PPC to Defend Your Organic Search Ranking

Using PPC to Defend Your Organic Search RankingRanking well in the SERPs for you targeted keywords is one thing, but your competitors can still advertise alongside (or even above) you. Not only is this a problem from an online reputation management (ORM) standpoint, but it’s also a problem for your online sales.

If this is happening with you, then you should consider PPC even if it’s not part of your acquisition strategy. Because if your competitors are bidding on your targeted or branded keywords, then they are worth defending.

Of course, defending your ranking for competitive keywords can deteriorate into bidding war, so there are two things you want to do to keep your costs down. First, you want to make sure that your ads are getting you the lowest possible CPC possible. And secondly, you want to manage your bidding in a strategic way.

Quality Score and Ranking

Google wants sponsored listings to be as relevant as organic listings. Consequently, Google rewards PPC advertisers whose ads are more targeted by giving every Adwords ad a Quality Score. And the better your Quality Score, the less you have to bid to have your ads rank well.

The two main things that affect Quality are (1) the relevance of an ad’s content to the keyword being searched, and (2) the ad’s click-through-rate (CTR) — i.e. how well it performs.

There are three elements of an Adwords Ad that contribute towards its relevance: the title, ad copy, and the URL displayed in the ad. The more relevant that each of these are to the keyword or search term, the better a Quality Score the ad will receive, and the less you’ll have to pay to put that ad at the top of the SERPs.

The other criteria Google uses to measure the Quality Score of a sponsored listing is by monitoring how many clicks it gets. After all, the more often that users click on an Adwords ad, the more relevant it must be to those keywords.

Quality Score, Costs, and Managing Your Bids

Once you have set-up your targeted campaigns, you’ll want to be able to manage bids as effectively as possible. This will help ensure that you’re only bidding on keywords when it’s necessary — otherwise you’ll end up paying for click that you didn’t need to pay for.

Managing your costs can be challenging when you’re bidding on competitive keywords. Different keywords will have different values at different times. So if you’re defending many of them, such as when you have several popular lines under one brand, you might consider PPC software.

There are several options out there, but it’s bid management tools should (1) help you identify poor performing keywords at a glance, and (2) notify you via email you when keywords have poor Quality Scores. For example, if some keywords perform better on certain days, then you might shift some of your budget away from those keywords on their lower-performing days, and whatever keywords are performing well.

Ranking in PPC

The trick to using PPC to bolster your organic SEO is keeping your costs down, and you do that by making make sure that your PPC campaigns are optimized for all different days and hours of the week. Start off by making sure that campaigns are grouped with the best possible keywords, and then ensure that you monitor them on an ongoing basis and adjust bids, budgets, and keyword sets on an ongoing basis. Finally, depending on the size of your campaigns, you might also consider an automated tool with the right set of bid management functions.All this being said, using these tactics and automated tools does require a degree of skill and knowledge about the PPC market, and building those expertise takes time and experience. So if you lack them yourself, you may also want to consider enlisting the help of a professional Pittsburgh PPC consultant to manage your campaigns. After all, the money you invest in their services can easily off-set the costs of swallowing the steep learning curve often associated with gaining those expertise yourself.

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