How do Website Design, SEO, and PPC All Work Together?

Unless you want to waste a lot of time and money, a website design project should never start with design.  It should start with opportunity analysis, meaning keyword research to determine what people who could become site visitors or customers are actually searching for.  What is their felt need?  What is their motivation?  What are their pain points?  What do they really want?  All of these things inform SEO strategy.

Once SEO strategy is determined, then – and only then – should website design work begin.

Proper SEO work starts with keyword selection.  To select the right keywords one needs to know which keywords or keyword phrases are actually being typed into search engines by people searching for what you do or sell.  It is important to target prospects at each stage of the buy cycle and make sure you provide content for casual searchers, people in the throes of deciding whether or not to buy something, and people who are absolutely ready to buy today.

A website cannot be properly designed to generate leads until you know what people are actually searching for, exactly what words they are using.  Otherwise your website may look pretty but not actually advance business goals.

If “form follows function” then every website design project should start by considering this age-old maxim from the discipline of design.  If the function of the website is to sell something today, then this function goal informs everything about the website design project.  If the function of the website is to build a mailing list of people who might become customers in the future, then this function goal informs everything about the website design project.  If the function of the website is to do both, capture engagement from people who might buy in the future, as well as capture today’s sale, then this will be a very different website than either of the first two examples.

Once you focus on your goal, know what the people who you want to attract are searching for, and make sure your website contains all the right “search engine bait”, and build the website with these things in mind, only then we can consider Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

To maximize results from your PPC advertising the same process will be followed.  This means that the keywords targeted will be the same.  The keywords should be in the ad, and on the page where those who click will be sent.

Why pay $10.00 to outbid your competition when a $5.00 bid can get the job done?

Google analyzes the PPC effort and applies a quality score that determines your bid amount for the ad rank.  If the keywords being targeted are the same as the keyword focus of the site, and the keywords and content on the web page that will result from a click, then I describe these issues as “in harmony”.  Google might as well describe these issues as “MONEY”.  When everything is in harmony, all the keyword relevancies are the same, then a quality score is assigned to the ad.

The quality score assigned by Google helps determine your cost for a click and the order that your ad appears on search results.

A high quality score can reduce your cost per click by up to 50%.  This means your $5.00 bid can outrank somebody else’s $9.00 bid for the coveted number one ad rank.  The number one ranked ad may be clicked as much as 3 times more often (or even more) than the number two ranked ad.

If you need help with any of this, hire a professional – it will save you many hours and many dollars of wasted ad spend.  Maybe thousands of dollars saved and tens of thousands of dollars earned!