I had an epiphany while working on a site yesterday, and as most lessons come from life, I thought I might as well turn it into a blog post.

The reality of SEM is that creating PPC accounts that yield a high ROI can often be more difficult than basic organic optimization.

The Differences Between SEO and PPC

SEO in many ways can be boiled down to these concept:

1. Create the most relevant piece of content and supporting content on the web about a subject in an easy to navigate and spider web page, using sound page and site architecture.

2. Create a strong title tag for your page.

3. Show your page to other people in your market, and find way for them to link to you

Now I do SEO on a day to day basis, so I know that is watering it down. I understand search algorithms take into account hundreds of factors of varying importance, and that part of the difficulty in cracking the organic rankings is the fact that almost everything is out of your direct control as a marketer.

But in reality if I gave you the term “dirty foot pizza” and told you to follow those concepts (I don’t know what the market is for a dirty foot pizza) you would likely rank very , fairly quickly.

An effective standard PPC account, even one for a less than competitive market, has quite a few more factors involved in its success. The ratio of success for a paid search account is smaller than that of the high ROI organic campaign, so its optimization can often be more difficult.

If it wasn’t why would companies need search. Too often the low ROI of paid search almost make PPC advertising seem like a craps shoot.

Like SEO, you still need to do a good amount of keyword and competitive research to effectively optimize your campaigns. Unlike SEO you have to deal with concepts like bid amounts, quality score, and the sometimes hard edged rules of paid search engines’ TOS.

Many marketers with little knowledge have started a manageable PPC account, but one concept that is often overlooked is the structure of the PPC account, and how it can effect performance. Your PPC account is more than just a system to write and bid on ads. It is also a key piece in your analytics puzzle. If it is not setup correctly you lose out on some pretty key data. Also an account without a solid structure can often lead to lack of optimization, or missed oppurtunity.

Use the Path Set by Your Site

The key to setting up a well maintained and functioning PPC account is following the map that is your site architecture. For example if I am setting up a PPC account for Dirty Foot Shoes (keeping it thematic) I might use this basic navigation:

As we can see Dirty Foot Shoes is going to have a site architecture somewhere along these lines.

If I were setting up a PPC account for this site structure this is what it would look like:

Account: Dirty Foot Shoes

Campaign 1: Womens

Campaign 2: Mens

Campaign 3 : Kids

Campaign 4: Juniors

Campaign 5: Athletics

Campaigns 1-4 would all have these Ad Groups:

Ad Group 1: Boots

Ad Group 2: Casual

Ad Group 3: Dress

Ad Group 4: Sandals

Ad Group 5: Wide

Ad Group 6: Narrow

Within these ad groups we would put the keywords that correspond to the concepts that these ad groups represent. Within these keywords you would use varying matching types, and create effective ad text for the groups.

What this allows you to do

By structuring your PPC account in-line with your site architecture you will be able to use the data gained from your paid search to:

- See which parts of your site are more attractive to your visitors. We may find from the above navigation that our Womens section has a 200% higher CTR than the average of our other sections, and this may tell us that we need to either spin this off into a separate ecommerce platform, or rethink how we attack the other ad groups.

- Get a rough estimate of how the different sections of your site fair in terms of organic search by utilizing the number of impressions you received from your campaign. This can help guide your optimization efforts.

- If you have a small site with precious little room for optimization, you should use this data to decide which keywords would be best utilized on your site

This information can be used to optimize your actual search account by:

-Giving you a clear idea of which sections of your site are converting, hitting at a high CTR, and the ROI you are looking for, all from a quick glance at your dashboard.

- Giving you easy navigation of your system to make basic maintenance changes.

- Giving you an easier way to find the eaxct location to add new keywords to the text adds that fit them the best.

- A way to gauge overall site performance in the same manner you view site performance for organic search (i.e. link juice shapping)

A well designed paid search account can be the catalyst for an effective PPC campaign, much like a well planned site structure is the foundation for a quality SEO strategy.