Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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or more than $1,000 a month, we’ll provide you with tips and pitfall-avoidance tech-

niques that will help you spend your money wisely.

Your SEO Plan makes provisions for you to set up your PPC account and moni-

tor it over the course of three months. This should give you enough time to judge cost-

effectiveness, learn what you can expect to get for your money, and decide whether you

have what it takes—both financially and administratively—to manage an ongoing PPC

account.

Even if you’re skeptical about PPC’s place in your long-term marketing plans, we

still hope to nudge you into trying PPC for the short-term:

How Do I Choose My PPC Budget?

This is one of the hardest-to-pin-down factors of SEO, and one that has as many variables as a high

school algebra fair.We’d love to put on our little green visors and help you arrive at the perfect

number, but instead we’ll have to give you some general guidelines and let you do the thinking:

Ask your boss (or whoever holds the purse strings).

Whether you like it or not,somebody may already have a number that you’ll have to roll with. Let’s

hope your PPC campaign pulls in enough conversions to convince them to up the budget when

your trial period is over!

Look to your current cost per conversion.

Perhaps you already have an idea of what a conver-

sion costs your organization based on tracking for existing online or offline marketing programs.

The preliminary research you do this week may help you make an educated guess about how much

you’d need to spend on PPC to meet or beat your current cost per conversion.

Consider your competition.

You already know whether or not you’re in a highly competitive

online space.This week, with the help of the PPC engine of your choice, you’re going to attach

some dollar figures to your top-priority keywords.Will you need to spend $0.15 or $15.00 per click

to wrestle into the top three PPC ranks for most of your keywords? The answer will inform your

budget-making process.

Think about your own level of enthusiasm.

Even though it’s likely that your PPC campaign will

run smoothly, proper campaign management takes continued interest and effort.Campaigns with

larger budgets often have more keywords and more ads, taking more effort than smaller cam-

paigns. If you don’t foresee yourself having the ability or time to keep up a large campaign, scale

down your budget, along with your expectations for clicks and conversions.

Pearl of Wisdom:

PPC can tell you a lot about your audience and your keywords in a relatively

short period of time, which makes it an excellent research tool for your organic SEO efforts.

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