There are probably a few of you out there that are managing PPC campaigns and SEO initiatives or have contemplated pursuing a search marketing career.

If you’ve worked for a small agency or a small to medium business typically the search marketing specialist is expected to handle both SEO as well as PPC campaigns. They both deal with search engines and keywords. Why not right?

But as you gain more experience and begin to work with larger enterprise PPC campaigns or you begin working with very unique SEO situations (i.e. localized sites, large network of websites, etc.), you will come at a crossroads in your career. You will need to specialize or at least focus your attention on one more so than the other.

The following is a comparison of the two career paths.

SEO Career Path

Being an SEO for more sophisticated clients or as an in-house SEO working with larger websites or network of websites (whatever the case may be), is a full time gig. Assuming you’re an actual practitioner and not a manager of people, you need to stay in touch constantly with:

• New search engine developments and algorithm changes
• Webinars and new techniques
• Learning from  your own experiences

On top of that you have to work with various teams or individuals:

• Managers & Stakeholders – Trying to get buy-in or reporting results
• Web Developers – Training them and supplying them with requirements
• Project Managers – Trying to squeeze in your requirements amongst the other 100 resource intensive requests outside of SEO
• Writers & Content Managers – Training, tweaking and improving the site’s content
• Social media specialists, Marketing & PR – Squeezing as much link juice out of their outward facing efforts

You’ve also got to be very analytical:

• Performing website audits
• Analyzing web metrics, log files and configuration files
• Pouring over code to make sure it follows best practices
• Drafting requirements and proposals
• Performing keyword research

This doesn’t even touch on the “culture changing” hat that you have to wear to try to convince clients or your in-house team that SEO is a worthwhile endeavor.

Who Will Be Successful at SEO?

• As an SEO you have to be able to prioritize and re-prioritize. You are usually working on other people’s schedules and priorities, not the other way around.
• Being a people person is extremely helpful because you’ll need to collaborate with others to execute on your proposals
• Being analytical is a must
• You have to stay up to date with the latest info. So being a self-starter is important.
• Most SEOs I come across are entrepreneurial; meaning they pursue opportunities with their clients or as an in-house person on their own without direction from others.
• Patience is also important attribute as well. It applies to waiting on results or waiting on other people to do tasks.

All this is very dependant on the type of clients you encounter or the size of your organization (if you’re an in-house SEO). But as an SEO, it’s a role that can change from day to day.

PPC Career Path

As a pay per click analyst or specialist, as you move up the food chain and work on enterprise level PPC campaigns with annual budgets dipping into the 7-figures, it too is a full-time career. When you’re spending that much time and money on a collection of campaigns, expectations are high.

As a PPC analyst 80% of your world is data.

Whether that’s analyzing PPC bids, click through rates (CTR) conversion rates or cost per acquisition (CPA); you are knee deep in data on a daily basis.

You’ll likely be working with Excel sheets, using it to create  your PPC campaigns or exporting data for analysis. Excel will be your #1 tool.

Who Will Be Successful at PPC?

• You’ve got to like numbers and be able to analyze them and make recommendations based findings.
• You have to be able to write compelling ad copy with strong calls to action.
• You will also likely be responsible for the optimization of landing pages and checkout processes. So an eye for improving conversions and usability will benefit you.
• PPC is a numbers game, so you have to be relentless at squeezing as much revenue and cost savings out of your campaigns.

If you’re the type of person that likes relatively instantaneous results with successes that can be directly tied to your efforts, then PPC might just be right for you.

One thing that is consistent in both SEO and PPC is that nothing every stays constant. Things always change and for the most part anyone who looks at either career should already know that ahead of time. It keeps things interesting and things don’t stay the same for very long. Hopefully this was helpful to anyone sitting on the fence

I came across the following tweet a few days ago that got me thinking whether having very large PPC campaigns with hundreds (if not thousands) of long-tail keyword terms were worth it. It reminded me of a campaign I had managed in the past:

Thanks to @Szetela in his webinar for confirming my belief: don’t bother w/ a huge keyword list w/ lots of long-tail terms.

- via @OnlineStrategy via Twitter

Before I dig in any further let me just say that I’m a HUGE fan of Chris Anderson’s book “The Long Tail…”. I think it’s one of those light-bulb moments you rarely get when reading these types of books.

Many PPC campaign managers have taken this book to heart and have applied it’s overall theory into practice. We carefully craft well organized PPC campaigns with tons of 3, 4…even up to 5 & 6 keyword phrases in the hopes of capturing PPC traffic at a low cost with a high Quality Score. Overall this method of creating PPC campaigns is very solid in theory. You attract people who are really vested in finding the right product, as demonstrated by the length of their search queries.

However, there comes a point where long-tail PPC campaigns can get out of hand. I recall a couple of years ago I took part in managing a large PPC campaign that targeted both head terms (2-3 keyword queries) and long-tail terms (4+ keyword queries). Overall the campaign breakdown was roughly 10%-15% head terms with the remaining part of the campaign using long-tail terms. The purpose of the campaign was to create awareness so there wasn’t any conversion per-say, but our goal was to get the most traffic with the lowest CPC.

After an afternoon of number crunching, we had found that the long-tail terms were eating up the majority of campaign management time, but yielded the lowest amount of traffic. Put another way, cumulatively the long-tail terms had less traffic than head terms even though it was roughly 85%-90% of the keywords that made up the campaign; and likely took up 80% of management time.

My overall conclusion from that experience was to avoid infinitely chasing the long-tail or else there will be diminishing returns in terms of management time spent tending to the campaign. There will come a point in a campaign where you’ve got hundreds (if not thousands) of long-tail keyword terms that it will make it very challenging for you to nimbly manage the campaign.

What’s your experience been with long-tail PPC campaigns? When considering campaign management time and costs associated with managing a campaign, has it been worth it?

Google unveiled today the new ad formats they’ve been recently testing. Although I haven’t seen these ads on Google.ca, I have noticed product inclusions in sponsored ads from product feeds via Google Base on Google.com (from a US IP address).

These ad formats were announced to agencies earlier this year and has been in beta. It should be interesting to see how they’ll be utilized once a wider audience begins to incorporate them into new campaigns.

If you’ve been part of the beta, I’d be interested to hear how these new ads have performed in your campaigns.

Adwords Video Ads

AdWords Site Links

Google Map in AdWords

Product Images in AdWords