A few weeks ago, I found pay-per-click specialist Matt DeYoung on Twitter. He offered to answer any pay-per-click question that anyone could throw his way. I took him up on it, and we ended up on the phone talking about an upcoming campaign that I was planning for a client. During the call, he had a lot of tips to offer, so I invited him to share them here on my blog. Here’s what he had to say.
Matt, tell us a little about yourself and your business.
In late 2006 I decided to start consulting for businesses on web development and search marketing. Now, in 2009, I primarily coach business owners on how to run their own PPC.
My passion is more teaching and coaching. I’d rather teach small business owners how to apply a methodology for developing and maintaining their SEM. I’ve always liked being a mentor. It”s more energizing than anything else I do. Maybe it’s because I was the oldest of four kids growing up.
SEO, PPC or both?
PPC is the perfect starting point. I strongly recommend a tandem deployment. PPC comes first so you can test. SEO comes second because you have data from PPC to prove the SEO investment is worthwhile.
With SEO your benefits are latent. In some ways, that makes it riskier. It’s lots of hard work up front with benefits on the back end. With PPC the benefits are immediate. You can test and fix right away.
It’s tempting to think of SEO as free. It’s not. I see this mistake all the time. There’s an upfront cost of both time and money‚ even for an in-house effort. Just as with PPC, SEO has a cost to produce more traffic.
Of course the important contrast between SEO and PPC is that SEO is a kind of one-time effort and expense. With PPC you’re always going to have to pay today’s rate to keep it going. Both are important for any business owner. But I strongly discourage comparing them equally. They should be used strategically, relative to the business’ goals.
I say why not hedge your bets and use a PPC campaign as a test bed for your SEO efforts?
When we spoke, it struck me when you said that companies should ask the question, “so what?”about their product or service, meaning that companies need to ask why customers would buy their products/services. I’m assuming that you do a fair amount of product and customer research before you research keywords or write ads. What’s your thought process when planning a campaign?
The secret to PPC marketing is simple: Get inside your customer’s head. You need to know why they search they keyword they do. Your customer has an inner conversation that started long before they entered a search query. What they search, why they search, and your “so what” answers should influence every aspect of your SEM and web design. “So what” summarizes the process of looking at your product’s features, pretending your the end-customer and asking, “Well, so why do I care about product? Why should I even take one more second to understand your service?”
Answering “so what” isn’t hard really. Technology makes it easy. I use Google’s Keyword Tool and website forums. That usually is enough to get the answer. Sometimes I create my own online surveys to dig deeper.
There are about 5 or 6 steps I do before writing any ads, or even creating websites. I have a strict methodology to uncover what will drive PPC conversions to a website. Five or 6 steps sounds like a lot. It’s easy to be anxious about getting started. It might take me longer to get started because of the research steps. But, once I nail down how a product meets my customer’s problem, and even down to which keyword they use, sales conversions follow.
Read part two of our interview with Matt DeYoung, where we focus on the most common mistakes that small businesses make when setting up their own pay per click campaigns.
