How To Drive More Website Traffic

By Beacon News | Published December 2, 2010 | Categories: Web Development

Building Killer Keyword Campaigns

When building out your keyword lists, it's best to think of keywords as questions. Does your product or service answer a given question or provide more information about it on your landing page? If the answer is no, then that keyword should not be utilized in your campaign. Once an extensive keyword list is compiled, it is time to strategize the structure of your paid search campaign. Structure refers to the organization of keyword buckets under campaigns in order to maximize the volume of qualified traffic. The structuring process creates a hierarchy based on performance (conversions), thereby making it easier for search marketers to find the most efficient mix of traffic and scale campaigns to maximize allocated budgets.

The key to planning an efficient paid search campaign is having a firm understanding of websites' offerings, marketing goals, and campaign management experiences. The more firsthand knowledge paid search professionals have about a specific vertical or company, the more likely they will be able to predict successful strategies.

Spending adequate time planning a paid search campaign is crucial to driving qualified traffic. Doing so affords paid search professionals the ability to create scalable campaign structure, which makes future optimizations easy. It also makes account management more efficient when dealing with budget constraints (i.e., marketers forced to make cuts must be able to ensure the most qualified traffic is not lost). Secondly, campaign structure and keyword grouping are vital components when it comes to determining the quality score of an account. If quality scores are high, this will help costs-per-click (CPCs) and account costs decrease over time. This means, if everything else remains constant, you can maintain a consistent budget level while driving a larger volume of qualified traffic to your site.

A few simplified tactics of campaign structuring include segmenting by:

• Keyword stage in the conversion funnel
• Audience segments (i.e., experts vs. novices)
• Geo-targets, site structure, and available landing pages
• Product benefits or features
• Historical search trends and seasonal patterns.

There isn't one standardized template for developing the right structure. The important thing is to maintain tightly focused keyword groups and a cohesive overall strategy. ~ Guest Post by: J Bannasch