Good day my SEO comrades! How are you? I want to get more people into Search Engine Academy training so they can do their own SEO, or manage their organization’s SEO contract.
I’ve been running Search Engine Academy Washington DC for over three years now, and I’ve decided to get help with my pay per click campaign management for an upcoming Google Adwords experiment I’m going to run. I’m finally comfortable that I can augment my organic search results with a PPC component.
I thought it would make a great blog post series to record and share my journey with you all as an online diary of sorts. Depending upon how this works out, I may use these posts and articles as a case study by the end of this year.
At any rate, the PPC journey starts with not a single step, but an idea. My wonderful SEO colleague, Steve Chafe, is a PPC expert. I am not, so I have Steve onboard as my SEO PPC consultant to create, implement, test and make a successful Google Adwords campaign. We first starting talking about me hiring him to help me do PPC the right way about two months ago. We bounced some ideas back and forth about the scope, who we would target, and how we would write the ads.
We started out by simply brainstorming what the parameters would be. Initially, we discussed at least three campaigns that target each of the three Search Engine Academy courses – the two day basic, the three day advanced, and the five day master SEO training classes, but we also decided we would segment and display these campaigns according the target audiences I want to hit:
- Marketing/Communications personnel
- Internet/Affiliate marketers
- Career changers
Steve and I talked about the different types of landing pages we would need to create. I see multiples of each course for the different target audiences:
- Marketing and Communications – any of the three courses
- Internet/Affiliate marketers – also any of the three SEO training classes
- Career changers – the five day master SEO course
Steve analyzed my website and sketched out some major changes to my template, which make sense. Up to this point, we’d been corresponding by email or phone.
We finally got our schedules to line up, and did an online meeting. Steve is a great idea partner – in some ways, he’s like the older brother I wished I’d had. We teach a module on creativity and SEO in our two day basic course, and as we had our online meeting, I saw exactly how it works, because we got some new ideas by bouncing some crazy stuff off one another.
I told Steve I have developed some custom SEO training packages for web content writers and PR professionals. Steve got pretty jazzed up and brought up something I hadn’t thought about – the big push towards content marketing. See how creativity works? I was stoked!
Long story short, we are going to develop a mini-site that’s stripped down to offer SEO training and certification for several target audiences. We bought a domain name, moved it to Steve’s server, and discussed Information Architecture and possible wireframes. My homework is to complete the IA and wireframes.
Steve’s going to set up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Now, we are going to refine our root keyword list and he’s going to the Adwords keyword research tool and dig out some groups of keyword phrases.
I’ll update you late next week or the week after on my journey. By sharing my own experience with you, I hope you’ll see how doing a lot of upfront work and research can increase your chances of PPC success.
Until next time, keep it between the ditches, umkay?!
All the best to you,
Thank you Nancy, your article is very inspiring and informative. It inspired me to work hard and continue my PPC Campaign. There’s a lot of benefits and very great Return of investment.
Thank you! It’s a lot of work to do it right. I wasn’t able to make any progress last week, but I am working on landing pages today. Thanks for sharing!
Very informative content about ppc campaign you have shared Nancy. Thank you very much.
Jina, thanks for stopping by – you are welcome!