An associate in Northern Arizona pinged me about an odd effect she was seeing in one of her client’s online marketing campaigns. They turned off their PPC campaign for a while and saw a quick and dramatic drop – 50-60% – in traffic from NATURAL search. Not from PPC, which obviously plummeted to zero, but from natural search results. “What gives?” she wanted to know.

Although Google denies any connection between PPC spend and natural search ranking (and I believe them), there is another, less obvious connection between the two: There is ample evidence that searchers are more likely to click a NATURAL search result if there is also a PPC ad on the same page. In their 2007 Search Synergy Report, iCrossing found that clicks increased by more than 90% and actions by 45% when SEO and paid search were combined.

So if you’ve stopped PPC, your leads from natural search ranking could well drop just from that effect.

What’s the takeaway? Maintain an optimized and efficient PPC campaign, maintain your ongoing SEO efforts, including keeping content current on the site and building in-bound links, and focus on site improvements that will turn visitors into customers.

I had a lively discussion with a writer and online marketing guy from a local ad agency over beers last night. (Side note: Wednesday is wings night at Sun Up Brewery, the hot wings are tasty and just the right amount of painful, and the Trooper IPA cools the fire with delicious efficiency.) Our conversation was about sneedobb. Not familiar with sneedobb? It’s pretty amazing stuff, but before we get to sneedobb, you’ll need the backstory:

The agency where my buddy works is running a self-promotion campaign which encourages readers to Google one of a selection of bizarre phrases, whereupon a page from the agency’s website shows up as #1 in the search results. It’s a neat trick, and according to my friend, it wows prospective clients: “Hey, look, you guys rank number one in Google!”

Like many an excellent magic trick, this one depends on sleight of hand. Which is great fun if you’re watching a freaky street magician, but it’s meaningless for search marketing. Why? Because there’s no relevance. And in SEO, relevance is the name of the game.

Unless, Of Course, Sneedobb is the Name of Game

The problem is, this SEO trick only works if you tell people what the search term is. And that’s not how search marketing works. That’s how advertising works, yes. Advertising is a push strategy – you push messages at your audience, such as “Drink our koolaid” or “Drive our car” or “Visit our website.”

But search engine optimization is about making sure your audience finds your website when they’re looking for what they want (not what you’ve told them to look for). In other words, the search term has to have relevance for the searcher. SEO is a pull strategy. The voodoo of SEO is in figuring out what your prospective customers might use as a search term when they’re looking for what you’re selling (really the process requires a bunch of research and marketing insights, but voodoo sounds way sexier) .

And I’ll wager you a rabbit that this ad agency’s prospective customers aren’t searching for “pumas have iridescent feathers.” Or any of the nonsense phrases they’re promoting.

And That’s Where Sneedobb Triumphs

You see, anybody can achieve a high search ranking for an irrelevant term like sneedobb. As a test, we’re going to see how long it takes this post to top the search rankings for sneedobb. Of course, to make this trick easy to do, I stacked the deck: As of today, January 28, 2010, there are no search results for sneedobb.

What, you protest? That’s cheating? Exactly. And it doesn’t matter, because nobody over the age of 11 believes that magic is real. Except, apparently, for some of this local ad agency’s prospective clients.

Update at 1:47 p.m. MST: The results are already in. It took less than three hours for this post to get number one ranking on Google for “sneedobb”. Even I’m surprised by that.

(photo by Hashmil)

If you’re using Wordtracker to do keyword research for search engine optimization, you may find this useful. Wordtracker is a great tool for keyword research, but it does have one puzzling quirk: Wordtracker gives us two indexes – KEI and KEI3 – and they don’t agree.

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, and it’s a formula that takes into account how many people are using a keyword (search volume) combined with how much competition there is for that keyword. KEI is great for comparing the likely effectiveness of two keywords you’re evaluating. But what do you do with two KEIs for each keyword? There’s not much info out there – not even from Wordtracker – on how to use Wordtracker’s two different KEIs.

Here’s how I use the two KEIs in Wordtracker. This assumes you want a final working list of 10 keywords:

1. Display your expanded seed keyword list. Click on Get Additional Metrics.
2. Click the KEI header to sort the keywords by KEI. Copy the top 20 (bigger numbers are better with KEI, so make sure you’ve sorted from high KEI to low KEI) and paste them into a spreadsheet or even a text document.
3. Click the KEI3 header to sort by that index. Again, copy the top 20 and paste them into your spreadsheet.
4. Compare your two lists, and pick the top 10 that appear on both lists.

Remember that KEI is just one way to start comparing and selecting keywords. The only real test of search engine optimization efforts is the results you get after you optimize your site and track the search-referred site visits over time.

By the way, I’m often asked “What is a good KEI number?” I recommend you use KEI as a tool for comparing two keywords, but don’t worry too much about the actual KEI number.