To support and enhance your SEO, the major search engines offer an opportunity of pay-per-click advertising. This is a special form of online campaigns where you pay just when people click on your ad so that they are directed to your website. Your ads will be shown when your campaign keywords are searched for in a particular search engine, however, you do not pay for these impressions, you pay only for the clicks your ads receive.

The beauty of using pay per click campaigns (PPC) is that you can see your link on the first page in Google (sponsored search section) literally within minutes, as opposed to SEO where it can take months to get listed for your main keywords.

Now we will guide you through the process of the main sponsored search provider – Google Adwords.

Pay per Click campaigns, apart from attracting visitors to your website, are an excellent source of indispensable information about how often individual keywords are being searched for and whether customers who come to your website searching for these keywords actually buy your services/contact you etc. This is one of the basics we need to know when we are choosing keywords for on-page optimisation (SEO).

We reckon that this data is even more relevant to the reality than the data provided by available free keyword tools.

It is not that difficult – having run and tracked your PPC campaigns for some time, you will easily find out which keywords are performing the best for you. In the next stage, you will simply include these keywords in your website more often and try to create content more relevant to these keywords. Best performing keywords should be in your meta tags as well.

You might ask how to know whether a keyword performs well or not. There are various indicators of this and you might decide which ones to follow. However, we recommend using them in the following priority order:

• The most important, something you probably want most to get from your SEO and PPC campaigns, is a high number of conversions. A conversion is when a visitor clicks on any page of your website you choose and set as a conversion goal. Usually, these pages are those which show after a visitor bought something, or signed up for your newsletter.
• Another one successful performance indicator is click-through rate (CTR).
• Apart from the above mentioned, you should also control your costs per click (CPC). Google Adwords campaign costs are partly based on CTR of your particular keywords – the higher CTR you achieve, the less you pay for a click. So if you want to save your budget, make sure your keywords match to your ads.
• Impressions are another measure you can see in your PPC stats. They tell you how many times your ad has been displayed. However, when you get high impressions without sufficient number of clicks, your CTR decreases and you pay more for every click. I definitely would not recommend using high impressions automatically as a positive criterion of assessing your keyword performance.However, Impressions can give you a good indication on what keywords are being searched for most, so that you can then include them in your search engine optimisation.