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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Use Paid Promotion to Refine Your
SEO and Make Your Visitors More Valuable'

Posted by shannonskinner
I recently found myself trying to give a client a rough estimate of the value
organic traffic brought them. In the process of doing so, I stumbled upon the
world of paid promotion. Considering Rand's Whiteboard Friday about
surviving the SEO slog, paid promotion is important to tactics that we know do
provide immediate tangible value, and I wondered if there was potential for it
to be a part of a wider online marketing strategy that could also enhance the
work of SEO. I want to open up that world a bit and discuss what I
discovered:how paid promotion can complement organic search.
First, let me define what I mean by "paid promotion." This might include
typical paid search, but also display ads, remarketing, and paid ads on
platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Paid promotion comes in many forms,
including sponsored images, sponsored stories, andeverything elsein the
following image (tap/click to enlarge):


Image source: http://imgur.com/z059ueV.png
Recently, there's been lots of discussion of the
decreasing organic reach on Facebook. It seems that there's been a shift in the
Facebook algorithmâcertain posts have seen a decrease, others an increase
in organic reach. Pages with over 500,000 likes are seeing a particularlymassive
decrease in organic reach, perhaps in an effort to encourage them to pay for
ads. Additionally, MarketingLand recently reported that Pinterest will be adding
promoted pins.
The reality is, paid promotion has a lot to offer online marketing, and can
really complement some of what you might be doing with search marketing and
optimization. Paid promotion offers a way to test things out to make sure
they're worth putting the effort and resources into, as well as add more punch
to the impact that search is already making for a site. Paid promotion offers
quick results you can control, making it a greatcomplement to your overall
marketing strategy.
Test things out: Use Facebook and AdWords to test your ideas
Optimizing for search and creating interesting content that will get shared
requires a lot of investment. Paid promotion can be used to test recommendations
and creative ideas out before investing a lot of time, energy, and resources
into making them happen. It can also be usedafter content hasbeen made to ensure
you're using optimal headlines. Upworthy provided a really fantastic deck for
how to make things go viral, and it included the recommendation of using
Facebook as a means to test headlines.




The Sweet Science Of Virality from Upworthy

Titles can be the difference, according to
Upworthy, between one million views and 17 million views. That's a pretty big
impact. I particularly love this deck because theyuse examples to illustrate how
you really can't predict which titles will work with people, making it critical
to test. And then test some more.
I've used Facebook ads to estimate interest in projects.Is the
click-throughrate (CTR) good enough to actually build out a project?If not, it's
better to go back to the drawing board and make sure you'll actually have an
audience. For a little more depth, this post also explains how to do what
Upworthy did to optimizetheir headlines.You can set up an ad campaign relatively
cheaplyâyou can purchase over 200,000 unique impressions for around $100
on Facebook (side ads, not feed ads, which are a bit more expensive). From
there,you can calculate whether there is a statistically significant difference
in the CTRs of each of your variances (if you need a statistics refresher,you
can easily usethis fantastic spreadsheet fromVisual Website Optimizer).

Image Source:Visual Website Optimizer
It can be used for determining the significance of any test by simply having
two sets of conversion statisticsâin this case, for "Visitors," you'd
enter the number of impressions & for "Conversions" you'd enter the number of
clicks. The spreadsheet provides a YES or NO about whether the difference
between the two sets of numbers is significant with 90, 95 or 99% confidence,
making the math super easy.If the difference between your tests isn't
significant, you'll have to run them again with a larger sample, or they may be
equivalently impactful, so you could use another version to test again.
Facebook has the advantage of segmentationâwhatever population you want
to target can be targetedâcat lovers, people who like a particular musical
artist, play tennis or live in a small town, but aren't from that location. Any
segmentation you can imagine, you can target.
To test for free, you can use Upworthy's trick of posting to specific cities
with different headlines, but considering the recent decrease in organic reach,
that may not yield the kind of results you're looking for.
AdWords can also be useful to
test out titles and keywords to target, as well as viability of new products.
Each of these tests will vary in price greatly depending upon the type of
keywords you're targeting as well as the number of clicks you end up needing to
get statistically significant results (same situation as with Facebook).
Unfortunately, you won't know exactly what you need until you've got it, but if
you can give yourself around $500 of budget, to test a few headlines, you may
well be able to get some quality data.
Either using Facebook or AdWords to test out headlines means you need something
to click to. I've found great success withLaunchRockâit's super easy to
set up and either use their server or your own to point visitors to. The added
bonus is that you can easily collect contact information, generating leads while
you're testing things out.
AdWords can also be a great
source of keyword data, in part because you can see what the conversion rates
are for different keywords for your site. You could use a similar technique for
Twitter, or really any other advertising platform. But these are some of the
most commonly used and advertised on, and relatively easy to launch advertising
for.
The advantage for SEO of testing in this way is that you can then select which
keywords to target and titles to usenot just based on volume of queries, but
also by how conversion rates for your site are for each query. Getting 500,000
new visitors where only 5,000 turn into new clients is not as fantastic as
getting 100,000 new visitors where 10,000 of them turn into new clients. The
same is true, of course, for amount of revenue. Not all traffic is equal, and
paid search can help SEO determine which traffic should be pursued, and which
titles to use to do so.
Pack more punch: Use remarketing to convertmore visitors intocustomers
It's great to get traffic to your site. It's even better for traffic to
generate revenue. Remarketing is basically targeting previous visitors to
encourage them to behave in the way you'd likeâbuying your product,
signing up for your email list, etc. It is
extremely effective (one study says an incredible 1,046% increase in trademark
lift!). Remarketing is effectivebecause, as AJ Kohn at Blind Five Year Old
explains, you are marketing to people who already came to your site. Larry Kim
provided an excellent case study on using remarketing to enhance the impact of
SEO on Moz last fall. It's a fantastic example of how powerful remarketing can
be for search, because it is a way to build brand.
There are some simple ways to do remarketingâremind a visitorto a
particular product that they were looking at that exact productâbut there
are also some other, more inventive ways to use remarketing. Get them to join
your mailing list. Offer a discount if they come back and buy. The important
thing, as Larry says in his post,is to:Provide them a call to action ("sign up
for our mailing list!")
Include branding or images that will improve brand recall

Image Source:ReachLocal
Always do some A/B testing with your remarketing campaigns to ensure you're
using the optimal ads. If your ad is in your brand voice, and has a message that
fits with your brand, you will be getting value out of the ads into the future,
because your ads will not only be leading to immediate action off of your call
to action, but also building up the recall of your brand.
Twitter conducted a study about the impact of impressions on brand favorability
and brand lift, as well as purchase intent. While this information is clearly
aimed at encouraging promoted tweets, and should thus taken with a grain of
salt, psychology has firmly demonstrated that familiarity breeds likability. If
you want people to like your brand, they should be familiar with it. And
impressions are one way to enhance familiarity.
As with testing out headlines and keywords that convert, remarketing can
optimize value ofthe visitors search brings to a site. Reaching out to people
who have visited the site, and thus clearly shown that they are interested at
some level in what you're offering can turn visitors into conversions, either as
customers today, or leads to nurture.
What do you thinkâwhen have you seen paid promotion complement SEO? Do
you think it should be a completely distinct strategy? Let me know in the
comments below!Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on
the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz
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