When you are setting up and managing your pay per click advertising, do you evaluate your competition? Do you see what they are bidding for your keywords? Do you take a look at their landing pages? You should.
Evaluating your pay per click competitors is a little different than SEO competition evaluations, though not much. You are looking at some of the same criteria. You do care what your competitors are paying for your keywords. Are they outbidding you beyond your budget means? That’s good to know. But you also want to see where they fall in organic search listings. Do you top competitors pay a lot of pay per click traffic and rank low for organic searches? Maybe you can beat them organically and bid just enough to ensure that your pay per click ads run alongside your organic listings. If so, that will give you a huge competitive advantage.
Other things to look at when evaluating your pay per click competition include:
- Landing Page Optimization
- Website Infrastructure
- Link Popularity
- Internal Link Structure
- How Many PPC Companies Are They Using?
- Ad Results
Some of this information may be difficult to uncover. For instance, how many PPC companies a certain competitor is using. But if you can find it out then you can see how big a budget they have. You can also watch their ads over time to see how effective they are. If a competitor tries a certain pay per click company and kills their advertising after 4 or 5 weeks, that’s nice to know. Maybe you can save yourself from using that company based on your competition’s results. Or maybe their ad wasn’t written effectively and you can write a better ad for that pay per click company.
When it comes to evaluating your competition, you need to evaluate your pay per click competition as much as anything else.
