At the begining of my SEO campaign is AdWords a viable part?

My site is only a few months old. I am in what appears to be a very competitive industry;
I have a State of Florida Online Real Estate License School.
I am writing articles, and submitting them to article directories.
I am also doing web diredtory submissions, and have done a few press releases.
Do you think that an AdWords campaign would serve me better than just trying to better my position in the search engines?
I opened a Google AdWord account, put a few dollars in to see what happened, Zilch, Nada, Nothing?
Is it the amount you have to bid per click?
Or in the very competative fields should I just forget about AdWords?
Trying to figure which way to go
Steve Simon
Lead Instructor

 

American real estate, is ,as a far as I can see, just about one of the most cut-throat industries on the web.
However, you're not exactly competing with them - so as far as adwords goes, I think it's a case of careful keyword list research and design.
When you say you got nothing - do you mean no impressions? - in which case you weren't bidding enough.
no clicks? - not the right keywords

 

I think finding which keywords in your niche
converts before you optimize for any keywords
is very important piece of data and advertising
on adwords can give you this info.

 

Yes, no impressions.
OK I must bid more, but do you think its worth it in my situation?

 

Forgive me, it must be my Senior Status, I didn't follow Jermaine?

 

The cheapest way and more reliable is to work your way up the SERPs, may take time but it should be the way to go. In the mean time, you can use Adwords, your industry is very competitive and it will cost you a small fortune to acquire traffic. Being in adwords won't increase your SERPS, they are not related.
Being new, you'll need to bid more, optimize your landing page and your ads. It will take time and money, but eventually your cost will go down. By then you'll just have to evaluate if the conversion rate is worth the cost of adwords.

 

While you wait for your SEO efforts to show some results in rankings (could take a few weeks - months depending on efforts/industry), you should (or can) use PPC to generate traffic to the site right away.

As SEO results start to show, you can decrease PPC

just my thoughts...

 

Sure you can. Figure out your targets, (roi, profit etc) and then build your campaign, set your bids based on your desired outcome and monitor/manager the account.

 

Thanks to all for your responses.
I will set aside a budget amount and start the AdWord Campaign again...

 

SEO is all about keywords. All your article posts, etc are worthless if they are built on the wrong keywords. Make sure you add Analytics to your site, along with Adwords and see which keywords are converting (goals) and which are bouncing. Click thru means nothing.

 

I think AdWords (used right) is an extremely important part of SEO, I often use AdWords to test conversion rates for a number of different keywords before SEO. That way I know which keyword I need to spend the most time and money on... sometimes I get no conversions at all, which tells me to either improve the product and try again or simply move onto another idea.