By Dave Davies, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc.

The quest for higher search engine positioning on natural search engines is generally quest to increase revenue from a product or service. It is not rankings themselves that hold any special value; it is visitors that they bring and resulting increase in business. It is for this reason that PPC engines and namely secondary ones are a great tool in developing a campaign strategy for natural engines that will produce highest return on investment.

While tools such as Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool and WordTracker are great tools for helping to determine which phrases are most searched, they cannot provide you with which phrases will produce highest return on investment and let’s be honest, search engine positioning is not about traffic it’s about money. While traffic can often mean money, knowing which search phrases are going to lead to highest conversion rates will give you a great advantage going into your SEO campaign.

While testing phrases on PPC engines will result in an increased timeframe for your search engine positioning campaign, this step can result in much higher conversions from traffic you are going to get. For example, if you were a business owner who was promoting a brand new acne treatment and you were to simply look for phrases with highest numbers of searches to target in promotions for your site, you would undoubtedly settle on single keyword “acne” as your primary targeted phrase. Will this produce highest ROI? Unlikely and lets take a look at why:

Keyword phrase: acne

Searches: 2,470/day estimated on WordTracker

Inbound links of #1 site: 2,642 on MSN

Number of pages of #1 site: 34,100

Approximate cost to optimize site assuming it is new with 50+ pages: $7,000 - $10,000 with guarantee.

Now, let’s a take a look at a less competitive phrase such as “acne treatment”:

Keyword phrase: acne treatment

Searches: 516/day estimated on WordTracker

Inbound links of #1 site: 216 on MSN

Number of pages of #1 site: 153

Approximate cost to optimize site assuming it is new with 20+ pages: $3,000 - $5,000 with guarantee.

Armed with this information you would then want to test these two phrases on PPC engines. Engines such as Google and Overture provide great reporting tools that will enable a website owner to actually track which phrases are converting for them, however at $8.85/click on Overture to be #1 for “acne” or $2.90 to be #1 for “acne treatment”, that option may be just a bit out of your price range. And so we have secondary engines.

Pay-per-click engines such as Enhance Interactive (formerly Ah-ha) make a great testing ground for those choosing their keyword phrases. Ranking #1 for “acne” on Enhance can be had for $0.15/click and “acne treatment” is only $0.23 to be #1. Setting aside money that could potentially be made from PPC engines themselves, with bids this low this engine and others like it make great testing grounds for keyword selection.

To test your keyword phrases simply bid to be #1 or at least in top three for a potential primary target phrase. Keep site ranking for a couple weeks monitoring your traffic and sales of your product/service. After a couple weeks remove phrase from your list and switch it to an alternative phrase. Again, monitor this success of this phrase for a couple weeks. After you have tested all of your potential primary phrases you will be in a position to assess which one will produce highest return on investment.

·They sign up with a pay per click search engine and start their pay per click campaign.

·They get lots of traffic, lots of clicks and pay lots of money.

·They don't make a single sale.

That's not how it should go - you can make tons of sales using pay per click advertising. I have several websites that ONLY receive pay per click traffic and they make sales on a consistent basis.

The problem is that you have to know what you're doing. With that in mind here are 3 quick and easy tips to help you get most from your pay per click campaign:

Tip #1: Pull Them In With An Attention-Getting, Optimized Title

Your web site title is first thing searcher sees. Make sure it matches what your web site offers or else you'll tick your searchers off - and that's not a good way to start a potential customer relationship!

(How many times have you been looking for something and clicked on a title only to find a porn site or a get-out-of-debt-fast site...talk about bad Internet etiquette!)

Also, try to put relevant, most popular keywords in title. Titles with keywords in them have been proven to get up to 50% more click-throughs.

If you can, write a title that lists a benefit to customer or evokes curiosity. Titles with benefits will pull more click-throughs than stale, factual titles.

“Shed Pounds Fast With Celebrity Diet Secrets” will always beat “The Diets Of Famous People”. One lists a benefit while evoking curiosity – second just evokes minor curiosity.