Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Friday: PPC Quick Check

Every Friday from now until the end of Your SEO Plan, we’re going to ask you to

check in on your PPC campaign. This weekly Quick Check will ensure that your cam-

paign doesn’t go dramatically out of whack over the course of a month. We estimate

that your Quick Check will take about 15 minutes, but today you get a whole hour

since it’s a new process for you!

Here are the steps to include in your PPC Quick Check:

• Log in to your PPC account.

• Check your total campaign spending so far for this month. Is your campaign on

track to spend your monthly budget on schedule? If you’ve set your daily budget

appropriately, it’s difficult to spend too much—but bugs on PPC engines are not

unheard of. You should also keep in mind that spending too little can be just as

bad as spending too much; you want to be right on target. If your campaign is

low, you may wish to add more keywords or increase some of your bids. If your

campaign is high, reduce bids or remove or disable keywords.

• For each keyword category, figure out how to sort the list of keywords by total

amount spent. Some keywords are going to be naturally more popular and costly

than others, so it’s probably not realistic to expect that your spending will be

distributed evenly among the keywords. If one or two keywords are using up too

much of your budget and you don’t think they’re converting well enough, you

may wish to temporarily disable them or lower their bids. Some keywords with

extremely high click-through rates may need to be checked on a daily basis. If

you’ve found a keyword that is gobbling up your entire budget, consider moving

it into its own category so that you can watch and manage it more closely.

• If you are testing multiple ads for some keywords, review which are performing

better. See Chapter 9 for more information on running a multiple-ad test.

• PPC engines are often so good at reporting that you won’t need to do much doc-

umenting elsewhere. But until you get the hang of PPC, you may want to make a

note of any changes to your account in your Task Journal.

Now:

Add robots meta tags to pages on an as-needed basis.

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