Ryan Pitylak

Don't start your SEM project by going after keywords using SEO. You may end up wasting either precious money, time, or page rank on keywords that might not be highly converting, high traffic, keywords. Although long-tail terms are incredibly helpful, in aggregate, if you don't have a lot of link juice (page rank), don't pass that juice along to terms that aren't going to drive you highly converting visits.

How much are you paying to acquire a user who is paying you money? More specifically, how profitable is that user? You need to look at the keywords driving your paying users, and only buy traffic using keywords that drive profitable users. Target a specific ROAS (Return on ad spend). Let's say you're aiming to make 20% from your advertising; just make sure that, on average, the keywords you're buying return 120% what you spent on them.

PPC bids are increasing as companies flock to Google to buy advertising. Bids have been increasing year-over-year, which is exactly what Google wants, but it can be bad for companies that are in highly competitive markets. Although the quality of traffic is high, and the volume of traffic is high, the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) may be too high for your business. The best way to figure this out is to test it. Start with low bids (let's say $1.00) and see how much traffic you get from Google. If you're not getting enough for your budget, increase the number of keywords that make sense and increase the bids per keyword. Bid more on keywords that drive you more profit, which will improve your position for the keyword, which will drive more traffic. Decrease bids for ill-performing keywords.