How to test your Keywords with PPC for SEO

We’ve all heard that keywords are important to create traffic for our website. But how do you know which keywords will work for your business?

93% of people “Google it” before buying a service or product. This is why it is nowadays vital to optimize your website to rank well for the right keywords in Google.

Ranking on top for keywords that nobody or not your ideal clients are searching for, will cost you time and money but will give you little or no return. For this reason in Search Engine Marketing it is important to do proper keyword research and test those keywords before you invest in them.

There are a number of ways to test keywords, however, the fastest and probably most reliable is PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising. By paying to be in the top results of Google, you will have your advert visible on the same day. You can replace keywords that do not work with new ones to test nearly in real-time. This trick will make you save months if not years of testing organically.

Organic SEO will, of course, cost much less, but it has a reaction time of 2 to 8 months depending on the competitiveness of the keywords chosen. This is why you want to test with PPC, find the good keywords that bring you your ideal clients fast and easily, then use these keywords for your organic SEO strategy.

Here’s a simple step by step process to test your keywords with PPC:

1. A/B Test your audience

You should start by testing your audience. Create a profile of two or three different audiences and run adverts about your products or services. This will give you an idea about how much interest there is for your product within the various audiences you intend to target.

2. A/B testing your Keywords

You can create different adverts for the audience that responded best to the test in step one. Test which advert would appeal to them most. You should change text adverts including different keywords to optimise your adverts. It’s ideal that you not only target a keyword but also use it in the copy of your advert. If you can use it in an image - better still. This will help you know whether there is interest in these words.

3. The Third Step in SEM

The third step is to keep track of where each lead came from - the various ads. You can do this by simply duplicating your landing pages or using conversion tracking code if you’re a more advanced user. What’s important is to understand which keywords have been used to find you by the visitors that became your ideal clients.

The follow-up

No matter how you do the testing, you need to keep track of the leads that came through and find ways to understand whether these were the kind of people you were hoping to attract. Speak to them individually if possible and make sure you understand why and how they were attracted to you.

Take note of how easily they turn into clients. How much they spend with you and what they buy. This information will be very useful when you come to the stage where you have to make decisions about how to optimise your website for keywords. It will also be useful when building various lead-harvesting tools on your website.

Now that during your tests you found out which keywords were bringing your ideal customers you can start to optimize your website, content, social media posts and topics around that keyword. You are now scaling your business successfully

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