Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

253

Tuesday: Organic Apples and Oranges

Today, you’re going to look for stand-out successes and unexpected disappointments

among your PPC keywords so you can use that knowledge to adjust future organic SEO

efforts. Why use PPC data to inform organic SEO? Because PPC provides data in a much

more tangible form, quickly, and with less investment of labor than organic SEO.

With a quick scan of your PPC keywords reports, you can gain broad-brush

insights like these:

• Your original keyword research led you to believe that a term is popular with

searchers…but is it really? The number of PPC impressions it gets can help you

confirm your suspicions.

• A keyphrase seemed targeted when you first assessed it…but is it? The number of

click-throughs/conversions a term receives can give you a clearer understanding.

• A keyterm didn’t make the cut for your organic top-priority list…but maybe it

should have. If a term is a standout PPC success, you may have underestimated

its organic potential.

Even with reams of PPC data in your hands, you may not arrive at any one find-

ing or number that will make you say, “Eureka! I should change my organic approach

this

way!” (But you can still just say, “Eureka!” for fun if you want. It’s good for

morale.) Factors such as low rank, less-than-stellar ad copy, or landing page problems

can throw off any of the preceding “broad-brush” judgments.

Today, you’ll use your PPC campaign data to judge the keyword choices you

made at the outset of your Prep Month, looking for over- and underperformers that

may need to be reprioritized. Here’s what we look for:

• Keywords clusters

• Standouts and disappointments

• Next steps for your organic campaign

Keyword Clusters

Your PPC keyword assessment starts with reviewing the performance of clusters of

related keywords. You can define a cluster as a group of stemmed keywords (“hang-

over cure,” “natural hangover cures,” “curing hangovers”) or a group of conceptually

related keywords (e.g., a “preventing hangovers” cluster vs. a “curing hangovers” clus-

ter). This can give you an idea of the context in which your target audience is most

interested in seeing those keywords.

Now:

Download the PPC Cluster Worksheet from

www.yourseoplan.com

c09. 8:10 253