Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Thursday: Enter Your Data into the PPC System

Today’s task is to transfer all of your keyword and cost preferences to your PPC

account without making it “live” yet. For each keyword or group of keywords, you’ll

assign the attributes required by your PPC engine of choice, like cost per click, maxi-

mum bids, and daily/monthly budget cap. You already have these numbers in your PPC

Keywords Worksheet. You’ll categorize your keywords as you planned on Tuesday and

insert the ads you wrote on Wednesday. You’ll also assign appropriate landing pages

for each keyword or ad. (And, to avoid wasting your money, make sure each landing

page URL is working properly!)

Today may be a simple cut-and-paste job, or it might be a little more complex

as you get used to navigating the campaign setup and management screens. But whatever

you do, make sure your account isn’t turned on yet. We’re saving that for tomorrow.

Friday: Turn On Your PPC Campaign

It’s been two weeks since you sent out your site modification requests to your team or

tasked yourself with making the changes. Is your site ready for its big debut? If you’ve

finished optimizing your website, your landing pages will be clearly relevant to your

PPC ads and targeted users will be able to find what they need. Don’t flip the PPC

switch until your site is ready. If your site content doesn’t match your advertising cam-

paign, it will confuse or annoy your visitors, and it may be removed by the PPC service

for noncompliance of editorial guidelines.

Assuming your site is ready for the trick-or-treaters to come ringing the bell, let’s

get started. It’s best to start this task early in the day so you can check that all is well

before you go home for the night. Rather then spend a continuous hour on this task,

we recommend you block out two half-hour segments of time. The first half hour you

will use to turn on your account, which is probably as simple as changing the attribute

“paused” or “offline” to “live” or “online.” Later in the day, you’ll spend another half

hour checking in on your account to make sure all is well.

Here are things to watch out for:

•

No impressions.

Don’t expect miracles, but do make sure you actually turned on

the campaign.

•

Too many clicks.

If you’re already close to blowing your budget after a few

hours, something is out of whack. Either you underestimated the number of

Now:

Enter all of your keywords, bids, categories, and ad content into the PPC system.

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