Using you PPC account you write small (typically two line) text ads. Then, using a list of keywords you choose (most services have tools to help you select keywords if you have not done so beforehand) you set “bids” – the amount you’re willing to pay – for your selected keywords. The better you bid, the higher your ad will appear in the search engines. However, only when someone clicks on the ad, do you pay the bid price – thus the term “pay per click.”

By definition the nature of PPC is a competitive one making it complex. In a bidding environment, the highest bidder usually wins. However you must be cognizant that keyword values are always changing, as new advertisers enter the marketplace. A PPC campaign must be monitored and updated (on an hourly, daily basis, and at minimum weekly basis) unlike organic SEO methods.

OK…Is this something I need to do?

The truthful answer is…it depends…but we say YES! There are lots of reasons to here are a few quick ones:

• If your site is fresh out of the starting gate, PPC is a great way to get it on the radar quickly (manual submissions are taking upwards to six months as of this writing) with search engines.
• If you are in a highly competitive market (i.e. Used Auto Sales near a military base), it’s a great way to get a leg up on the competition.
• You want to steer visitors to a specific place on your website (that new product/service/promotion or just a landing page).
• You want to have more conversions (that’s visits to sales/sales calls or whatever your site is designed to do for you/your business).
• You only pay for the click through.

That last item is a really good point to stress. How much do you pay for your phone listing or yellow page ad? Imagine that the phone company provided you real time reports on 1) who is reading your ad, 2) who is calling from the regular listing vs. the yellow page ad, and lastly 3) you only pay the phone company ONLY WHEN a potential customer used the yellow pages to call you)! With a PPC campaign you can budget by bid/time so you can stretch the money for the web campaign. You can also increase or DECREASE your budget amount (so a ski resort can up the ads when the snow flies and then lower them during the summer) with a few clicks. The yellow page people can only give generalizations and averages…and just try to change your yellow page subscription rate or ad on the fly! A PPC campaign provides REAL value to your marketing dollar.

Also w/PPC you become a “customer” of the search engine…so they provide tons of useful information to help you get the best performance out of your ad. After all…it’s in their best interest to help you get lots of people clicking your ad!

So is PPC really right for you? Our rule of thumb is – if you are a non niche business (and who isn’t thanks to the internet) and would like to get more visits to you site, then yes.

So we’re going to explain why you don’t need one, and what you should be doing instead for SEO.

Most web sites will normally implement a hit counter on their site for one or both of two reasons — to give them a rough estimate of the number of visitors, and/or to give visitors the impression that their site is popular and thus worthy of a good look.

Let’s consider the first reason. There is nothing wrong with wanting to know how many people have visited your web site, in fact it’s something that you really do need to know for SEO. However…putting a visible hit counter on your home page is not the answer, especially not one of those free services.

For one thing, the free services require you to promote their site as part of their free service. For another, they are normally slow and increase the time it takes for your pages to load.

Most importantly, a hit counter doesn’t provide you with all of the information you need for true SEO.

Just look at any of the top web sites out there and we promise that you will not find a visible hit counter on any of them!

That alone should tell you that the common hit counter is worthless. If a visible counter was worthwhile, don’t you think CNN or Yahoo would have one?

You just can’t win with a visible hit counter. If your site does not get many visitors, all it’s going to do is make sure that the visitors you do get know that they are not visiting a popular site. If anything, this will most likely discourage visitors from exploring your web site in detail.

On the other hand, maybe your site gets 50,000 visitors a day and you think that letting people know this via a hit counter is a good idea, right? Not really. If your web site gets lots of traffic it is because you are doing things right, and a visible hit counter isn’t going to affect traffic one way or another.

Unfortunately, what normally happens is that the misguided webmaster will set up a visible hit counter on their home page and then artificially inflate their visitor count. This is done in the hopes that it will impress people, but it’s a terribly bad idea and doesn’t work.

In the early days of the web it was “cool” to have a hit counter on your home page, but they are so commonplace these days that no one pays them any attention. No matter what your reason for using a visible hit counter, we say dump it and start tracking!

Track Your Visitors’ Footsteps!
While the big sites don’t have visible counters on their pages, rest assured that they know your every move. No other advertising medium allows you to do the things the internet does, and it amazes us that more marketers do not take
advantage of serious site tracking.

Part of the problem seems to be that many internet marketers are only concerned with promoting their web site and getting more people to visit. More visitors equals more sales right? Well yes that is true, but only if your web site leads visitors through the sales process.

Before you even begin promoting a web site, you should have in your mind the path that you want visitors to take through your site. For example, sales is a process – one step leads to the next, until finally the end result is hopefully that what was once just a prospect is now a customer.

Tracking your visitor’s footsteps throughout your web site is the best way to determine why they didn’t take the action that you wanted them to take. Who knows, maybe 80% of your visitors aren’t even making it past your introductory page? You’ll never know unless you track them.

Consider this – this is an SEO rule that is written in stone. If you’re not tracking your entire web site and tweaking it on a regular basis, you’re throwing money down the proverbial drain.

From a profit standpoint, it is critical that you know the answers to questions like:

1. How do visitors find your site in the first place?

2. How many of them make it past the main page?

3. Which page of your site is the most popular?

4. How long does the average visitor stick around?

5. What is the average number of pages viewed?

6. What path do visitors take through your site?

7. What links do they use to leave your site?

If you don’t know the answers to these simple questions, here’s an easy way to increase your profits starting immediately. And the good news is that there are lost of tools that do not cost you anything other than some time.

OK…I’m tracking my site….now what?
The point of tracking your site is to act on the information you gather and use it to improve your web site’s SEO effectiveness. If you discover that 80% of your visitors aren’t making it past your home page, or that the average person
leaves within 2 minutes, you now have your work cut out for you.

The real value of tracking your visitor’s footsteps is that it will help you determine why they did not take the action that you wanted them to take. Once you see how most people navigate your web site, you can then make changes until
the path they take is the one you want.

Spend some time implementing a good tracking system on your site, because if you can increase your visitor-to-sales conversion just a few percentage points it will be more than worth your time.

Remember, it doesn’t matter how many hits you get if your site doesn’t do its job!