When you really get down to it, getting people to your website is about words.

I know, that sounds so boring. It’s not as slick and sexy as words like “keyphrase research” or “linkbuilding” or “black hat techniques” but it’s the truth. Whether you’re engaging in SEO or PPC or both, search engines rely on the use of words to figure out what the heck your site is about in the first place.

So what good does that do you? To get a whole list of words, and then stare in the face of complicated tools like SEO and PPC, with a few bucks in your hand and no clue which path to throw it towards? Here’s my advice.

Get realistic about your keywords

If you have a 10 page site and want to rank for “realtor,” you might as well attempt to rank for the word “the.” It just won’t happen. You’re a small fish in a massively huge, shark-infested ocean the size of Saturn. (I don’t know exactly how large Saturn is, but it’s big. It also freaked me out in college to learn that it’s less dense than water, so if you submerged it in water, it would float. Freaky.)

You have to be realistic about what you’re going to be able to rank for organically. When you do your keyword research, go ahead and log all the keywords you know apply to you or that you might be interested in, and note the searches per day plus the competition. That kind of information is helpful for both your organic and pay-per-click marketing plans. The overall competition will give you an idea as to overall competitiveness, because odds are good if it’s a rat race in the organic world,  it’s going to be a rat race in the paid one.

So you have this keyword list…

I recommend you put it in Excel, and sort them based on the column of competition first. Yes, searches per day are important, but they’re irrelevant if you’re choosing words that have too many other people aggressively going after them. You’re a 10 page realtor, site, remember that.

So you see “realtor” has 16,000,000 pages in competition or something. That’s out. Your 10 pages won’t get you there, even if you make 1,000 more pages over time.

Maybe then you see something like “realtor for farmers.” Do you specialize in helping people find farmland? Hmm. Why yes. You do. You  look at the competition….let’s say it’s 80,000 pages. (These numbers are hypothetical, in case that’s not evident. I don’t need a bunch of SEO Geeks informing me I’m wrong – this is for illustrative purposes you dweebs. Back off.)

So, 80,000 pages isn’t quite so bad. And let’s say they get 50 searches a day. 50 searches times 30 days means there are about 1500 searches a month. Not bad, right?

Finding those diamonds are what you want to target for SEO. There will always be competition, but if you dig enough, you’ll find longer-tail keywords that have decent search volume and lower compeition. There’s an added benefit there as well: they’re more specific.

Don’t start whining. I know you want tons of traffic and to have your website explode into being the only sales vehicle you’ll ever need but in this era, specific is better. If you drive a single person searching for “realtor” to your site over 6 months versus 5-10 a month that searched for “real estate for farmers,” guess which one is more likely to call? Right. There are eight bazillion realtors (a lot of whom are pissing themselves because of the housing market) but there are way less for those that specialize in farmer needs.

Can I bid on what I can’t rank for organically?

Ok, here’s where people also tend to go a little nutso. They want to bid on “realtor” because they know they can’t rank for it. This can be a strategy, but again: be realistic and think of the long tail on your market.

If you specialize in selling condos in Minneapolis, why would you bid on “realtor” running nationwide? Your clicks will be insanely expensive and you’d be mostly marketing to people who don’t at all qualify for what you have. Quell your ego, and construct a PPC campaign that is smart: bid on condo realtor related keywords, and geotarget your ads for Minneapolis. You’ll reach a broader audience for competitive terms that way, but still keep yourself into that defined area of marketing to people that are qualified for your service.

Which way is cheaper?

There’s this ongoing battle about whether SEO or PPC is more expensive. Frankly, it depends on so many things, I can’t even begin to lay it out in this entry. I’ll detail it out for you in another one. That said, BOTH of these methods are an ongoing process. There’s no quick way to rank organically, and while your ads start showing in PPC quickly, having the best-performing campaign possible also takes time.

I’d always recommend a combination of both, assuming that PPC is a viable form of advertising for your product. (Hey, sometimes it’s not.) I’ll do a more specific breakout on how costs of these boil down, too. It’s also worth it to note that you will find oddities in the how sites are ranked compared to what they are, as is the case with my buddy Dave Doolin. Find out how a search for his site name (which is an awesomely helpful site about WordPress and other assorted design things) brings up ones about vampires instead. No, I’m not kidding.

In the meantime, you can also read more about knowing which fancy-pants keywords you should and shouldn’t be bidding on here.