That’s for a single keyword, however. So if you’re bidding on 20 keywords, and you choose to pay the
same amount for all those keywords, your overall monthly PPC spend would be $1,800–$3,000 per
month. Most small and medium-sized business can’t afford to sink that much money into a PPC
program, so you’ve got to find a way to reduce that amount. That’s usually accomplished by begin-
ning with a few of the keywords that you’ve defined and then replacing the ones that don’t work
with others from the list that you’ve defined.It’s important to remember, however, that PPC shouldn’t be the only element within your SEO
budget. In fact, PPC should equate to only 20 or 30 percent of your total SEO budget. Other SEO
efforts should also be ongoing, so that over time your organic keywords and other SEO efforts
become as effective as your PPC and other paid marketing campaigns.Understanding Bid Management
According to some experts, online marketers will spend more than $7 billion on PPC campaigns by
the year 2010. This means that PPC campaigns are going to become more competitive and more
expensive in the very near future. To help you compete, you’ll need to monitor and manage your
keywords very closely. Bid managementis the method by which you control the amount spent on
keywords. There are two methods for bid management: manual bid managementand automated bid
management.Manual bid management
Manual bid management is bid management that you conduct on your own. To manually manage
your PPC bids, you must keep up with what your competition is doing, track your conversions,
test and monitor the performance of existing and new keywords, watch your PPC campaigns for
fraud, and make changes to all campaigns when necessary. And if you happen to be running PPC
campaigns with more than one PPC provider, you must do all that for every group of PPC ads
you’re running. It’s a very time-consuming process.That fact is enough to make some people opt for using automated bid management software or
services. But even with automated bid management, there are a few strategies that you’ll need to
manage on your own: Don’t obsess over the number one slot.It’s contradictory to what you would expect, but
you don’t really need to be number one. Nor can you afford to be number one in most
cases. The number one slots are usually snatched up by large companies that are using
PPC to boost their sales. And they often have seemingly unlimited budgets to spend on
their PPC efforts. That means if you’re fighting for the number one slot, you’re likely to
spend so much on that spot that your PPC campaign will be pointless.
Another reason to avoid the number one slot is that most people don’t trust the first ad or
search result on which they click. Many people will click through several ads before they
make a purchase, provide information that generates a lead, sign up for a newsletter, or136
Part II SEO Strategies
75002c09_6.qxd 11/7/07 9:39 AM Page 136