There are certain mistakes that everyone makes when they set up their first PPC campaign. Loading up every keyword suggested is the first one. Run a keyword analysis on your website before you write your first ad and look for keywords that are “high traffic” and “low competition”. That means that a lot of folks are searching for those keywords and not a lot of websites are featuring them. Make a list of those keywords that look promising in both areas and then create some ads. Make sure whoever is handling PPC management for the account keeps track of what’s hitting and what’s not so you can make changes in that keyword list periodically.

Once the keyword analysis is done and you have an idea what your ads will say, add some pages to your website to use as landing pages for your new ads. This is where PPC and organic SEO can be used in conjunction with each other. They should complement, not compete. In order for that to happen, your link building campaign should focus on the same keywords that your PPC campaign does. Add even more power to the effort by writing articles and blog posts using them too. The combined use of all your tools to focus on a set of low competition keywords should bring you increased traffic.

Those who do small business SEO have been benefiting from the collapse of big retail that came about as a result of the latest recession. The massive corporations that controlled the power keywords in the retail industry by throwing millions of dollars into PPC are no longer able to do that. Some are out of business and others have changed their strategies. That means that certain keywords can be targeted by ambitious smaller companies. Of course, they’re still expensive, so adding a few more affordable keywords to a PPC campaign might not be a bad idea.

One more, slightly less well-known PPC strategy, is to use long-tail keywords that are specific to your particular company. An example would be, instead of something general like “pet food”, going with “Purina dog food in Los Angeles”. You might get less traffic from something like that, but every hit will be a quality one from a potential customer looking for something specific that you sell. Long-tail keywords also give you better article titles, something that will bring you links and direct traffic.

First off, if your internet marketing specialist is calling himself a “guru”, you should fire him just for that. Guru means teacher and that’s not what you’re looking for when you hire someone to bring in new business. If you wanted to learn how to do it yourself, you’d go back to school for it. Here at First Page Placements, we’re a Los Angeles SEO firm that gets results; we don’t teach classes. If you have questions, we’re happy to answer them, but our main focus will be on improving your page rank and increasing the amount of traffic coming to your website.

One of our core beliefs is that everyone needs to do the job that they are best at and not attempt to tell others how to do their job. Our writers don’t try to be designers and our linking specialists don’t create software for web presenters. We don’t tell you how to run your company and we ask that you allow us to do our job when you hire us because we are the ones with decades of experience in internet marketing. Things tend to work smoother when the provider/client relationship works that way.

When you first sit down with one of our organic SEO specialists, we’ll go over every detail of what we feel is the best approach to take for your company. Your input is valuable to us, especially when it comes to who you want us to target and what direction your company will be going in. Research and development projects should be considered, because SEO is an ongoing process. We want to start building your presence in a niche market long before you actually get there. When your product or service is ready for launch, you’ll already have a pool of potential customers to market it to.

A guru is great if you’re working a nine-to-five job and want to start something on your own. That’s the time to take some lessons in internet marketing. If you’re a serious business owner and want to improve your bottom line, you want to hire a professional that knows how to do that and let them do it. There are dozens of responsibilities to be delegated every day. SEO is one of them, the one that we happen to do best.

One thing that every SEO company in the world will tell you is that first page placement is the gold medal of the SEOlympics. If you can get on the first page, you will get organic search traffic, and that means you’re in business. It doesn’t matter whether you use organic methods, PPC management, or some other hat’s toolbag to get there, if you’re not on the first page, you’re dead in the water.

Right?

The answer is “not always”. There are actually times when you might not want to spend the time and effort it takes to get onto the first page of Google — it might actually not be worth the investment. It sounds like an impossible scenario, but it can happen. That’s not to say that being on the first page is ever a bad thing, mind you — just that you might have other priorities that take precedence.

For example, if your site is built to sell to or otherwise take advantage of a specific community, you might not care that much about Google’s SERPs. If you were the genius that first thought up icanhascheezeburger.com, you knew up front that your audience was 4chan and that was about it — at least until the site went viral and everyone bookmarked it for themselves. If you’re the person who profits from the banner ads on elementscommunity.com, you don’t give a crap about Google because your entire audience consists of people who play elementsthegame.com.

Similarly, if you have a site that serves a specific geographic locale, you might do better to purchase IRL advertisements like billboards, newspaper ads, or local radio spots in order to increase awareness of your website. You’ll still definitely benefit from a first page placement, but you don’t actually NEED it to get by.

Of course, if you’re one of the 99.9% of webmasters who doesn’t have a large community to piggyback off of, you’re going to have to choose a route and aim for the moon, because without a first page placement, you’re going nowhere with extraordinary speed.