Every business learns that investing in marketing is the only way to scale a business and to keep the bottom-line healthy. While most businesses are right to keep aside a large percentage of their marketing spend on SEO and PPC ads, it is quite likely that a lot of it being wasted due to the adoption of the wrong strategy.
Businesses make a number of mistakes while running SEO and PPC campaigns, but fortunately, adoption of the right strategy can eliminate missed opportunities, unwise spending, and poor performing campaigns.
In this article, let us take a look at some of the common SEO and PPC strategy mistakes that cause businesses to lose a lot of money. In the second section of the article, we suggest tips and tricks that help you to optimise your marketing spend and strategy, so that you get the results you need and deserve.
A number of surveys point out to the fact that businesses often run their PPC campaigns around irrelevant keywords. Just because a keyword seems relevant doesn’t mean it is going to fetch you leads or business. Instead, it might help competitors to gain ground in places where you have missed out. For this reason, keyword research is a very important aspect of PPC campaigns. Typically, SEO and PPC teams should work together to identify strategic keywords that help in directing traffic that matters. haphazard choice of keywords in content and ad copy results in poor marketing campaigns, and wasteful spending.
Without adequate data insight, it is easy to keep launching campaigns after campaigns targeted at a wrong demographic. Many businesses notice that clicks from outside their target demographic results in wasteful PPC spending. A similar problem occurs with SEO campaigns too. Not strategising content around the right demographic and not setting the right tone results in wasteful content management strategy. Data insight helps businesses to discover who their target audience really are, and ensure that both PPC and SEO campaigns are tied around audiences that actually matter. Improving visibility by enhancing brand awareness and running coordinated PPC and SEO campaigns helps in ensuring clicks from the right target audience as well.
Marketers often notice that conversion rates are lower than they expected, even when they spent quite well. Here lies an important lesson to learn, for spending too much doesn’t necessarily mean good ad scores. Good ad scores depend on a number of metrics, and focusing on each of these metrics before a campaign is launched is crucial for its success. Mere creativity without a solid basis in analytics will not fetch the kind of ad scores that are typical of optimal ad relevancy. Again, having a strategy in place and using the right analytical tools are important to enhance ad scores and conversion rates.
Running a PPC or SEO campaign has dramatically become more complex in recent years. Not only has the technology changed, but psychographic and behavioral metrics have changed too, necessitating an approach that involves data analytics. Without adequate expertise or knowledge, complex PPC and SEO campaigns cannot fetch the results they claim to. Unfortunately, many businesses work with teams that are subpar and thus miss out on advanced data insight. In addition, an agile approach to marketing campaigns is very important for both PPC and SEO campaign success. Agile marketing is based on agile framework and methodology and provides consistent results across marketing processes.
A strategy that helps you spend less
To make the most of your marketing budget, begin to develop a strategy that works for you. Adopt a strategy that has been tried and tested by agencies across the world. Such a strategy depends on successful implementation of data analytics, improving landing pages, enhancing content, and focusing on mobile environments.
Let us take a quick look at these four pillars that help build a solid marketing strategy.
The world has changed radically since the advent of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and data analytics. Data analytics is single-handedly helping IoT and AI to move further, resulting in the insight that has far-reaching marketing implications. User-behaviour can now be scrutinised to intimate levels, but how one uses all this insight depends on the kind of team you work with. When you choose the right data analytics team and use insight to fuel your SEO and PPC campaigns, you will begin to see that you need to spend less on your campaigns.
Most landing pages are not optimised for SEO or PPC campaigns, and they are directed to generic pages that do not fetch results. To enhance conversion rates and ad scores, landing pages need to be optimised on multiple fronts. The focus should be given to CTAs, graphics, and also to mobile optimisation of landing pages. Most people visit landing pages after clicking on ads displayed on their mobile devices, and optimising landing pages is an important task. Landing pages also have an important SEO function, and that is to help your services and solutions appear in organic results.
Existing content needs to be enhanced with specific keywords to help build your SEO. This step does not require fresh content to be written and can help your website in multiple ways. In addition, using data insight to create content that actually matters to your target audience will help you to fetch better results. Most marketing companies build their content strategy around irrelevant keywords, and that is only going to result in ill-advised marketing expenditure.
It doesn’t need to be reiterated that web traffic today mostly depends on mobile usage. Yet, a lot of PPC and SEO campaigns are centered around desktop devices and are not optimized for mobile devices. This results in wasteful expenditure, especially when it comes to PPC campaigns. Make sure to hire a team that is well versed with mobile optimisation of PPC campaigns, so that you get to reap the benefits of Ad Words and other online advertisements to their full extent.
Your strategy may well decide how much you spend
As you can see, wasteful expenditure is mostly due to a faulty strategy adopted by marketing teams. Thankfully, data analytics, agile methodology, and an expert team should be able to help you reduce your marketing expenditure, and also make your campaigns more targeted and optimised. Before you launch SEO or PPC campaigns, make sure to have your strategy in place, and implement the latest technologies and project management methods to keep your expenditure in check.
