Why Are You Redesigning?

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Sometimes it is clear when you need a redesign. For example, if your site is still using Flash, it isn’t viewable on many smartphones, and you definitely should consider redesigning.

Other times, it can be less clear. Sometimes even bad designs are meeting the needs of your client, so it can be hard to give a good reason why they need a design. Why pay money to improve something that is working at the time?

Usually the reason most designers cite for needing a redesign is to make their site “look better.” This isn’t really a viable reason for clients however. Kendra Gaines, writer for Webdesigner Depot, has a different argument for redesigns that your clients will love.

Redesigns aren’t only a way to offer clients the latest design trends or “make things look better.” Redesigns can be a way to entirely revitalize a brand or business. A redesign can be enough to breath new life into a business or brand that might be stagnating.

Gaines uses examples from business such as Keds, who subtly redesigned their product line to re-invigorate their popularity, but doesn’t tend to connect the ideas to web redesigns. This is interesting because Webdesigner Depot just did a massive redesign of their webpage.

The website redesigned to a responsive web layout allowing their content to be available on all platforms, but it also helped refine their image. The site seems more efficiently laid out, and they have made social media buttons readily available at all times.

This redesign acts as the perfect example of what you should be thinking when trying to redesign for a client. The site was brought up to date with the current design standards, as well as adding usability features that are great for users, but they also used the opportunity to help refine their brand as a whole.

When you are preparing to do a redesign for any brand, try to remember these ideas. If you are just trying to add the newest trendy features to a site, all your work will be undone when the next wave of features hits the industry. If you subtly try to help the brand define itself, your work will be making a lasting impact on the company in a positive way.

 

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PPC Ads Hurting Small Businesses Bottom Line

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The cost of doing business with pay-per-click advertising has risen sharply over the past decade. So much so, many small business owners are wondering if the price they’re paying to get their message out is worth the return on their investment.

As Darren Dahl reports for the New York Times, larger companies joining the PPC craze has caused rates to skyrocket and nearly priced out smaller competitors.

AdGooroo, a research firm specializing in the PPC market, reports that more than nine out of ten companies spend less than $10-thousand a month on PPC advertising. At the other end of that spectrum, however, are giants like Amazon and University of Phoenix, who spent $54-million and $37.9-million respectively in the first half of 2012 alone.

The advice many experts offer is to scale back PPC ads and make keywords as specific as possible to your business. General keywords like ‘life insurance’ or ‘car sales’ put you in direct competition with a number of companies, many of whom have much deeper pockets.

PPC also shouldn’t be your only advertising platform. Branching out into social media and search is crucial to drive as much traffic to your site as possible.

It’s worth looking into SEO services to improve your organic search rankings. There’s even services online that pledge to manage your social media marketing accounts, as well. When you own a small business, time and money come at a premium and online advertising is becoming costly for both.

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Should You Be Using Longtail SEO?

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Longtail SEO is beginning to become the dominant method for article marketers to be successful in the results pages, as well as strengthening brand visibility and awareness. It is the most effective method for most marketers.

In the past, the problem for many has been deciding whether to invest energy, time and money into marketing a single primary keyword, which might receive a high volume of searches every month, or possibly to focus on a longtail keyphrase. The longtail keyphrase might only get a small amount of search queries every month, but it allows for the business to achieve the top ranking, which receives the most traffic.

Trying to focus on a single keyword puts you at a disadvantage. It may get queried more than your longtail phrase, but it will be such a crowded market, you would be lucky to get on the third page or results. When most traffic goes to the very first result, being on the third page isn’t going to get you many visitors.

Longtail phrases on the other hand put you in a much higher ranking on SERPs for less popular related queries, which will net you more traffic overall. As Justin Arnold, writer for The Mightier Pen, puts it, you have to choose between theoretical popularity, and actual sales traffic.

Choosing a longtail phrase is much too big of a subject to cover here, but the main idea is to think about claiming a corner of the market. People are searching for more specific queries, so marketing a longtail phrase for your specific area of the market puts you in a good place to actually get some sales.

 

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10 New AdWords Features to Watch For

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As with any Google service, AdWords is constantly innovating and improving. Lisa Raehsler recently put out her list of the 10 best recent AdWords improvements at Search Engine Watch.

1. Media Ads

This one hasn’t been fully made available yet, but could be huge for certain businesses. The ad includes two links, one to a landing page and one to a relevant video, which is expandable from the ad.

2. Product Listings

These ads are linked to a Google Merchant account and show your product to users searching for a relevant keyword. Also currently in limited release.

3. Enhance Sitelinks

New sitelinks are larger and actually appear like regular ads, but they’re connected to one closely related ‘umbrella’ ad. CTR have reportedly significantly improved with the enhancement.

4. Remarketing

Currently in beta testing, advertisers will soon have the opportunity to use a consumers previous search for keywords to show them relevant ads on subsequent searches.

5. Offers extensions

Ads and offers combined. Your specfic promotion or coupon is included with your ad and can be saved to a Google offers account.

6. Reminder extensions

Users can send themselves an email from your ad reminding them about a sale, opening or special. Just started in beta.

7. Remarketing in Analytics

Build targeting lists in analytics using a variety of factors, including referral source or the site the user came from. These lists are easily integrated in AdWords.

8. Dynamic Display

Target specific users based on their activity or websites based on their audience. Display ads will link with a Merchant account to show your relevant products.

9. Comparison ads

It’s a cost-per-lead model that does just what it sounds like. Compare your prices to other companies. This one may be a long way from full release, but it’s being tested on financial companies.

10.  App promotion

Advertise your app to app users. AdWords does most of the work here providing the graphics, formatting and updating the rating ad reviews.

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Consistency Key to Online Branding

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Online branding ruins everything you thought you knew about branding. It is no longer strictly a marketing activity for multinationals with million dollar budgets. Online branding is simple and practically free.

The internet allows businesses of all sizes to participate with their webpages, secondary sites, social media outlets, and company blogs. These areas are also exactly where it is important to establish a successful branding strategy. But how?

It is first important to remember branding is a lot more than a name and a logo. It is a philosophy encompassing the values and way of doing things. Branding alone can increase the perceived value of any kind of product by creating an image that depicts the product as more than its actual value. Gucci is just a clothing designer, but because of the image cultivated around the brand, their products are perceived as higher value than most others.

Ray Vellest, writer for Web Designer Depot, argues the most important aspect of creating this type of image is consistency. Making sure all of your messages are on point establishes an idea in potential customers’ minds.

People associate Gucci with luxury because they only present images of their products with luxury settings. The people in their ads are always dressed in some form of high fashion, and in an extravagant setting.

Similarly, Louis Vuitton has had a long running campaign of images of pop culture icons with their luggage, and they choose these celebrities carefully. Sean Connery, Madonna, and Keith Richards have all been in ads for Louis Vuitton, and the imagery suggests that of the “rebellious” upper class.

When bringing this strategy online, think digital presence consistency. Start with your username, or profile. Using the same username across the web is a big step towards creating brand consistency online. It brings continuity to interactions customers have with the persona or company through various methods.

Another method of establishing consistency is visually. You begin working with the company’s logo, keeping it absolutely consistent across all platforms. But it is also important to design a secondary logo that will fit within the square profile image space alloted by social media platforms. The second logo has to be a visual continuation of the first.

When interacting with potential customers online, you need to be keeping a consistent voice as well. Many companies have multiple people handling their social media accounts, but their voice needs to match the voice of the company. To do this, define your tone by finding one that matches your brand image. Law firms should maintain a serious and formal tone, while a record store, for instance, has more liberty to be less formal and maybe opinionistic.

By creating a consistent image all across the web, you can begin to cultivate the type of branding that huge corportations spend millions on every year. It is as simple as keeping everything focused in the same direction, and sending the same message.

 

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Tweaks to Bing Ads Improve Performance

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Bing Ads recently made Sitelink Extensions available to all U.S. users, which allows advertisers up to 10 sitelinks to their ads. This helps consumers navigate directly to their desired page, rather than landing on the homepage and having to find their way around.

As Pamela Parker reports for Search Engine Land, during beta testing, click-through-rates for ads with sitelinks improved by as much as 25-percent over standard ads.

In another tweak, advertisers no longer need to be logged in to use the ad preview tool.

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Search Is Still The Dominant Online Advertising Sector

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The latest research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, which examines the first half of 2012, finds that the biggest contributor to online advertising in the U.S. continues to be spending on Search Marketing.

With 48% of all interactive advertising in the first half of the year, search ads brought in $8.1 billion.  It is also 19% higher than during the same period of 2011.

Performance pricing, usually cost-per-click, remains the dominant pricing model and has continued to get stronger.

For graphs of the data, visit Pamela Parker’s write up over at Search Engine Land.

 

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The Value of Trend Line Analysis for Your PPC Campaigns

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In order to improve your existing online ad campaigns and discover new opportunities that you’re currently missing, you have to study the analytics. Trend line analysis is likely included whether you use AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter or any other platform and it saves you from poring over column after column of numbers. Instead, you are presented with an easy to read and, more importantly, an easy to digest report.

Matt Van Wagner has an in-depth report on different types of trend line reports and how to use trend line analysis at Search Engine Land.

Let’s look at some potential errors to avoid and how to make these reports work for you.

First and foremost, you have to understand the context of any report and be sure to enter proper parameters. If your reporting time is too short, you may see a graph suggesting a problem that isn’t really there. You may also notice a simple fluxuation of variables beyond your control and perceive it as a problem with your campaign.

Before making any changes, do some investigating. Take the guesswork out of online advertising and diagnose the problem. Then, you will know what needs to be changed, or what can be left as is.

Always keep your specific campaign goals in mind. For some, conversion rates improving but total conversions going down could be a problem. However, if it’s in line with that campaigns goals, then you’ll probably want to leave the campaign untouched.

Sometimes it’s what you decide not to change that will make the biggest difference.

With time, you’ll start to be able to recognize at a glance a graph showing the early signs of trouble. Be sure you understand not only what each individual trackable metric means, but also how they relate to each other.

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The Importance of Being First in the Results

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New research from Compete.com is suggesting being the first result on a SERP can make a huge difference from being second.

The analysis comes from “tens of millions” of consumer-generated search engine results pages from the last quarter of 2011. It also had some really interesting findings. 85 percent of all listings shown are organic, with only 15 percent paid search listings.

Out of the organic listings, 53 percent of clicks are going to the very first result, with the second result only seeing 15 percent, and all others getting even less.

Analysts from Compete.com summarize “since the vast majority of listings on a SERP are organic, and the majority of clicks are on the first listing, it’s imperative that brands strategy including constantly monitoring results due to the ongoing evolution of search engine algorithms.”

The paid results are also getting a large amount of clicks. Most specifically, ads in the top of the page perform very well, with between 59 percent and 9 percent of all paid results clicks. Ads on the right hand of the page however, get at most 4 percent of paid results clicks.

Overall, it is important to get your listings in the top position, if you want your page to be getting attention. For graphs and analysis of the results, read Miranda Miller’s article at Search Engine Watch.

 

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5 Tips to Stretch Your Modest AdWords Budget

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Change

Chances are that your company doesn’t have piles of money to throw at advertising in order to get results. Most likely, you’re wondering how to get a big ROI from a modest to meager ad budget. Jeremy Decker has five tips for you, which you can read more about at Search Engine Journal.

1. Utilize lower ad positions

When you search for a specific topic or product, do you always click the first result that appears? I’m assuming you answered ‘no’ because I don’t know anyone who does.

With that in mind, you can take advantage of ad placements below the top three on Google and still see results, often at a lower cost-per-click.

2. Specific targets

Using general, one-word keyword will allow your ads to pop up more often. However, your audience in that scenario will rarely be searching for exactly what you offer.

Instead, use keywords that pinpoint what your business is. These ideally would be phrases of three or more words, which will probably include your location. Fewer users will enter those search terms, but the ones who do will be hoping to find a business just like yours.

3. High-converting keywords need their own campaign

Be sure to check out how each of your keywords are performing. When some separate themselves as ‘high-converting’, consider creating a campaign that includes only those keywords. This way, the most effective keywords will have a budget to themselves. Otherwise, less effective keywords could show up more and you’ll reach your cap without the heavy hitter getting a chance.

4. Display network doesn’t get conversions

Using the display network option in addition to, or instead of, search results will potentially spread awareness about your company to a gigantic audience, it usually doesn’t yield conversions at a high rate. If your ad budget is limited, it’s best to put all of your investment into search traffic rather than limiting yourself in order to invest partially in such a risky venture.

5. Location, location, location

It’s not just a key for real estate. AdWords allows you to track what cities your traffic and conversions are coming from. With this information, you can get the most of your budget by omitting your ads in locations where conversions are low. You can also create new campaigns specifically for your top performing areas.

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