Many retailers spend copious amounts of time and effort running separate paid search (PPC) and natural search (SEO) campaigns, but don’t spend enough time looking at the synergies which are available by integrating them.
It’s important you’re using the strengths of both SEO and PPC to your benefit. PPC is great because you can turn it on quickly, integrate stock availability and pricing to create really compelling adverts at the top of searches on Google, Yahoo or Bing in no time at all, but if it’s not managed properly your costs can spiral out of control.
SEO is much more cost effective, but takes time to build up and you may need to make several changes to your site architecture and content before you start seeing your site rank for competitive keywords.
Spend time keeping up with the trends that happen in your market. Use Google Insights for Search to see the search volume for keywords and plan seasonality into your search campaigns accordingly.
Searches for bikinis peak every year at the beginning of June, so make sure you’re weighting your PPC budgets at this time, as well as having your SEO strategy working on “bikini” phrases several months beforehand so you are already near the top when the searches go through the roof.
If you see a high Cost-Per-Acquisition on your generic keywords think twice before just cutting them out of your PPC campaigns too suddenly. Very often generic keywords won’t drive sales themselves but they will contribute to the consumer’s purchasing decision making – making sure your brand is on the shopping list – therefore click path analysis tracking is great to see what role your generic keywords are playing earlier in the cycle.
Finally, if you’re spending lots of money on PPC and SEO and you’re not getting the desired conversions, have a look at your bounce rate, this is the metric for the % of people who land on your site and immediately click “back” to visit another site.
If your bounce rate is over 50%, it would be worthwhile allocating budget on conversion optimisation and usability to make your traffic work harder for you.
Written by Finlay Clark of bigmouthmedia, the UK’s leading online marketing specialist for fashion retailers
