A Pay Per Click campaign is about more than just advertising. It can be a rapid method of finding out which keywords will bring the best traffic to your site in the long term.

While Search Engine Optimisation promises to deliver good volumes of traffic to your site, the problem is that it takes a long time to get good natural rankings, and it does not make sense to carry out long term SEO campaigns for keywords and phrases that might bring in lots of traffic but not the type of traffic that converts into business.

There are a few good keyword research tools on the market but even the best of them can only tell us the search volumes for phrases and how competitive each one is in search engine results. What they cannot do is tell us which phrases will deliver traffic that will convert into actions such as sales, online enquiries, newsletter signups etc.

This is where a trial PPC campaign can be really useful. We’ve found PPC can be an excellent way to test the water with our clients’ real and potential customers, and it can give us helpful indications in a fraction of the time that SEO takes to deliver results. As long as we can implement good tracking for your site’s traffic, a trial run of PPC can be a good exercise for determining not only the volume that comes from each keyword, but also which keywords convert into sales or enquiries.

Once we have run a PPC campaign for just a few months (usually 3) we are usually in a position to determine a good mix of the best converting phrases and, armed with this list, we can begin the hard work of long term Search Engine Optimisation for those phrases.