Whenever I check specific markets to see if there is a niche that is worth it to me to give PPC marketing a shot, I check out the competition. In many cases I run into websites that are nothing else but PPC shelters – websites with no real content other than landing pages and surrounding “contact us”, “Privacy Policy”, and “About us” pages. These pages are usually added to gain some better Google Quality Score in Adwords. But other than there is nothing that would make it a real website. My approach to PPC marketing is a little different. Every website I build I also build with SEO in mind. I kick of my PPC campaigns, but I also do some minor SEO to get the website indexed in search engines and to eventually gain some organic traffic. Organic (free) traffic is great to have as it can provide income you don’t have to work for. Search Engine traffic is not a short-term thing really as it takes time to rank well for specific keywords. It also requires additional efforts to build the website. I usually spend some extra time to add unique content to each page to bypass some of the filters Google and other search engines have in place for duplicate content.
Several PPC gurus have also the suspicion that a website that has incoming links gets better Adwords Quality Scores assigned compared to websites or domains whose only reason of existence is the PPC traffic the owner wants to send to it. When doing PPC keep in mind that Google prefers unique and original content. Google does not like affiliate marketing as that is a huge problem when it comes to duplicate content. I am sure they will extend filtering efforts over time to shape the Internet the way they want it and not how the marketer wants it. If you are building a business for the long run your efforts should reflect this accordingly. I use WordPress to build my initial website and then add content. I can then manually join the landing pages into the mix without exposing them to the public that is trying to find out what I doing. WordPress is also good to use when it comes to SEO. It takes me about an hour to setup WordPress and to customize it for that specific website I am working on. After that it is just adding content – pretty smooth sailing if you ask me. SE-friendly links and a few other pieces are fast and easy to implement with existing plugins. Then it is just up to you how you add incoming links to a website.