There seems to be much noise on the Internet about getting the most visitors to your website, that you might be forgiven for thinking that all Internet Businesses were simply profit came pro rata to the number of visitors they had.
On the internet, just as on the High Street, it’s not the footfall that counts, but the profit from each visitor.
This why keyword research should figure as an ongoing activity in your Internet Marketing Strategy.
So, where do we start. OK, well lets forget about SEO at the moment (gasp, horror, I know but we don’t know what we want to focus on).
We start with Pay per click, we need to know what keyphrases generate buyers and not just visits.
So after setting up our pay per click campaign we monitor what is actually generating sales (or telephone enquiries if you’re using a call tracking system).
Measuring Costs
We are all in business, so it is a good idea to understand what we mean by costs. Cost is the cost per sale (or telephone enquiry). Simply take the number of sales generated by a keyphrases over a period, divide by the Pay per click cost for that keyword, hey presto, your cost per sale.
When is cost too high?
This will depend on your business model, but the measure we use is 20% of average sale value. In other words, 20% or our turnover we budget for going back in to online marketing.
Analysing the data.
Once you’ve got some useful data you can start making some decisions. You will have four groups in your keywords:
- Low Conversion, High Cost
- Low Conversion, Low Cost
- Low Cost, High Conversion
- High Cost, High Conversion
OK so what do we do with the groups.
Groups 1 & 2 generally get ignored and dropped. We make a record of it for future reference, but we really have no interest in them.
Group 3. These are of the most interest to us. We maintain them in a PPC campaign, whilst we focus our SEO efforts on them. You will generally find that these are the easier of the two last groups to get Organic ratings for (not always but most of the time).
Group 4. We drop from our PPC campaigns, but do include them in our SEO efforts, but secondary to group 3.
There you have it, 2 useable groups of keywords, that should maintain your sales without breaking the bank.