Getting front-page, organic search engine rankings is the holy grail of search engine optimization. It is also a lot of work and a time consuming process. And, most of the time, you won’t succeed on making it to the front page for competitive keywords.
So, with all that potential for failure, why not run a series of tests on your keywords before getting into the down and dirty SEO tactics of building links or optimizing individual pieces of content? It ís not nearly as hard as you would think, and odds are, you’re already doing a version of this test as part of your business.
The perfect SEO test
The perfect mechanism for such testing is already in place, and you probably already use it: Pay Per Click advertising. The idea is to drive traffic to a landing page with a basic opt-in mailing list through paid advertising in order to test whether or not a specific set of keywords can be profitable.
If, for example, you run this test campaign for 1,500 visitors, and only three or four of them convert, then that particular keyword probably isnít worth the hours upon hours of optimization work you had planned to do. Yes, it will cost you money initially to run the PPC campaign, but in the long run you will be able to precisely determine which keywords to focus on, which will make you money in the end.
Pitfalls?
The main pitfall to avoid while running this test is confusing traffic with potential earnings. If you run a targeted PPC campaign and drive a lot of traffic immediately, you may think to yourself that these keywords must be profitable because traffic has arrived so quickly.
Conclusion
This is not necessarily the case. Traffic is only valuable if the people making up that traffic (or at least a percentage of them) perform the actions necessary to earn you money. If you’re running a website for a hobby and just want to share content with like-minded people, then the more traffic the better. But if youíre running a business, the more targeted traffic the better. Using PPC campaigns to test the potential profitability of keywords prior to launch a full-fledged search engine optimization project can be one of the most useful tools in your arsenal if used correctly…
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