I haven’t tried it yet but I’ll probably start experimenting with it this afternoon.

Here’s the link to the article:
http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2008/04/22/how-to-whip-the-competition-in-organic-search-results/

If anyone would like a tip, I find that the best niches are anything to do with home and garden. This surprised me, but they always seem to do well. Another tip is to avoid male beauty products

Also, excellent PPC tips from Paul Montwill up there!

You are right on the money.

Paul - That is correct. SEO is not really free. It is more cost effective long term, but it is also more risky and you don’t have the kind of targeting power you have on PPC.

On the other hand, people think SEO is free and that is why it is better than PPC. It is not. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to get to the first page in Google and we shouldn’t really consider our time on link building as free.

I installed the adsense code on Tuesday, and blow me over, my adsense account is at $232 today.

Paul - Thanks a lot for your input. Those are very useful tips.

I tried to avoid getting into too many details about PPC because the purpose of the post was to explain why SEOs should use it to improve their keyword targeting. Sadly, most SEOs hate the word PPC.

There is definitely a lot to learn about PPC. I’m looking forward to Dan Thies new free book PPC fast start. Check it out when he releases it at http://www.seofaststart.com

1. I wouldn’t recommend limiting a daily budget in the long term. If you want to stick to the budget, turn off the campaign on some days of the week. If you go for a maximum number of impressions per day, work on maximising your CTR and positions, your CPC will get lower.

2. In campaign settings, make sure delivery method is accelerated and Ad Serving rotate (you don’t want the system to pick your best ads, you want to get rid off low performing ads yourself - after a few days/weeks of testing considering all the factors including CPC, conversion etc.).

3. Still in campaign settings, enable position preference. I was able to increase my average positions by even a few places while keeping my CPC at the same level.

4. I also turn off Search Network as they are not always as reliable as Google search.

5. Try aiming on the top 1-3 as they usually bring the highest conversions.

6. Control your Quality Score. Read Google help regarding this topic. Make sure your landing page is relevant.

7. I have recently improved CTR from %16 to %30
by adding one additional word in the displayed URL (one of the keywords). The higher CTR, the higher position and lower CPC (Google always leverage high performance ads/keywords). Test your ads, read, learn.

8. Use PPC stats/tracking to test keywords and use this knowledge for SEO. If a keyword is very popular and competitive in your industry, but doesn’t bring high enough conversion in PPC, maybe it is worth focusing your SEO on something else.

9. Make sure you set-up locations and languages for all campaigns.

10. Consider switching off the weekends - especially if your business relies on customer service or direct contact and you are Mon-Fr business. Other reason might be that you have much less clicks than during weekdays and it results in the CPC and Cost per Conversions are higher (or not as low as during weekdays).

11. Benefit from Google Adwords tools, like Campaign Optimizer. Download Google AdWords Editor to see the whole picture of your campaigns and easily import/export ad groups. Use different Reports and set up automatic generation.

12. Use Online Commercial Intention tool from AdCentre if you are in e-commerce. You can have better predictions in terms of conversion rates:
http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/oci.aspx (Query)

13. It is not only Google. From my experience the lowest Cost per Conversion comes from MSN first,
then Google, then Yahoo. Both MSN and Yahoo platforms are much more difficult to use than Google,
but it is worth to have a try. I have read similar comments regarding MSN conversion rate.

14. Learn from your competitors when it comes to ads. They make a lot of mistakes (especially when you type in a keyword and not a single one is included in the text ad) but also may provide you with a lot of valuable clues.