Considering Sponsored Links?

The past two weeks we've been discussing how to improve the natural search engine ranking of your website. While having a top ad on page one of sites like Google is important, you get a 60% higher click-through rate when you also have a high sponsored link on the same page.

Sponsored links are a large part of how Google, Yahoo! and Bing make money. These search engines charge site owners for every click (aka pay-per-click). The cost per click varies depending on the word or phrase searched and the sponsored link's position. The more popular the word or phrase, and/or the higher the position, the more expensive the click costs.

It takes careful thought and on-going maintenance to run a cost effective pay-per-click campaign. Your need to identify which words, when clicked, will likely result in qualified leads and ultimately customers, and minimize the cost for each click. For more information on how word choice on your website affects page ranking and pay-per-click), read “Web Writing Rules.” The more words and phrases in your campaign, the better. You want to exactly match as many relevant searches as possible. Exact matches get ranked higher than near matches, and often pay lower amounts. For instance, if a user were to search "New York speeding ticket attorney," someone with this precise phrase would rank higher than someone who merely has "speeding ticket" in his or her campaign. Further, someone with the exact match pays less per click than someone who merely has a near match. General phrases are more expensive than "long tail" phrases because more users are bidding on them and because search engines will display them by default if your campaign doesn't have an exact match.

Another important part of any pay-per-click campaign is negative key words. Those are words or phrases on which, when part of a user search, will result in your ad NOT appearing. You want to use negative key words to reduce the number of un-qualified leads which you receive. For example, because my law firm only fights traffic tickets in New York, we have New Jersey and NJ in our negative key word campaign.

A final aspect of an effective pay-per-click campaign is your ad copy. You want to run ads which encourage users to click on them. The way you optimize your ad copy is through "A B testing." You run two ads against each other until you determine which one is more successful. You then repeat the process with a new B ad.

To be effective, you need to continually expand your key words, and negative keywords, as well as test and improve your ad copy. With time, however, a sophisticated pay-per-click campaign will be worth your time and effort.