Pay per click or PPC advertising has been around for a long time and it has proven to be a great way to gain sales – it can also be a great tool to use as part of your keyword research program. If you use PPC for keyword research you need to be prepared to take a small gamble, however, if it successful the dividends in the form of leads or sales could be huge, particularly if they are free through organic search results.

The gamble is that you will need to either increase your present PPC budget, or create one, or allocate some of your current budget. Your keyword research program should already include an analytics package that tells you which keywords are being used to find your site.

From your analytics identify those keywords that are relevant to your site but for which you have not spent any time optimizing. Commence a PPC campaign based on those keywords. If you receive a reasonable click through rate with a reasonable (cost effective) conversion rate, then you may have a keyword that should be optimized on your site.

If further keyword research shows that it is not a frequently used organic search term, you will at least have found another profitable keyword to use in your PPC campaign. Some keywords will be difficult to rank well for – again simply retain them for a PPC campaign.

You need to be prepared to carefully monitor your PPC trial. If the keyword used is getting a lot of clicks but not converting, stop the campaign and remove that keyword from your list of possibilities.

PPC can be a great way to assess the potential of keywords. Your analytics software should be a great place to identify keywords you may not have considered in the past. Using these keywords in PPC trials can be very effective as part of keyword research program – and very profitable.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 3:07 am and is filed under Analytics, Keyword Research, PPC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.