As I consult with companies who want to enhance the return on marketing dollars they are spending online, I have come to appreciate the benefit of understanding how to use PPC to inform search engine optimization. This information can save you a significant amount of time and effort.

Just a like a company's house list, the information they gather from their own PPC campaigns can provide a significant boost to the effectiveness of their search engine optimization efforts. The key is to know what information you're looking for and how to use it to generate qualified visitors to your website.

Qualified visitors are those that have a higher degree of interest in your products or services and a greater likelihood of purchasing your products. I've often seen websites that have reduced their traffic while significantly improving conversion rates. The result is lower costs related to traffic acquisition and higher revenue. With more revenue and less expense, margins reach a new level of success.

The concept that I teach in SEO training is the most effective way to combine pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization is to focus on conversions. What keywords have you promoted through pay per click advertising that led to conversions? If you've been running PPC for a while and you are still unsure, then consider expanding your analytic coding to include Google conversion tracking.

Once you have the answer and know which terms produce the greatest conversions, regardless of ad variation, then you SEO keywords have been determined. You want to generate organic traffic to the same keywords you're promoting through PPC as long as they are generating your highest conversions.

An example of this might be someone promoting a book on how to fix a car. If the highest converting keyword is, "car repair", then you should consider car repair as a keyword phrase you must optimize for. Organic traffic to this term will produce targeted web site visitors and conversions for little or no money as you improve your rankings.

The last piece is to take your highest converting landing pages and build in some or all of the elements into your website. Once you've tracking and optimized landing pages via PPC, you can duplicate what you've learned from a conversion perspective organically. Consider applying the landing page elements that have generated the highest return for you on your pay-per-click advertising.

Whether you're just getting started with search engine optimization or consider yourself a search engine optimization expert, leveraging your pay-per-click advertising is the best investment you can make. Determine which keywords generate the type of traffic that is most valuable to you and optimize around these terms. They will generate more traffic and revenue.