Common Misconceptions About PPC Ads

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Pay-per-click advertising, such as Google AdWords, can offer a variety of benefits for your company, but you should also be aware of the things it cannot do. Unfortunately, there is a lot of chatter that creates myths about the capabilities of PPC advertising. Lisa Raehsler of Clickz recently set out to debunk some of these myths.

1. PPC and Instant Sales

Don’t expect to start your AdWords account, then kick back and watch your sales numbers soar. You’ll need time to tweak your campaigns and hone in on your target audience. This is especially true for niche markets.

2. PPC Isn’t A Cure All

There are times when pausing your PPC campaigns is actually the best option. Don’t rely on them to help sales rebound in all situations.

3. Consider More Than Conversions

Just because an ad doesn’t directly lead to a conversion doesn’t mean it isn’t doing its job. Many consumers need multiple interactions before they will turn into a conversion. Your ad may have just opened the door for a future conversion.

4. PPC and SEO

There are plenty of people who have pushed the rumor that companies who advertise with AdWords receive better position in Google search. It’s simply not true.

5. The Top Spot Isn’t Tops

Many times, the top spot will perform best in sales, but you’ll also be paying for that position. The conversion rate for lower positions can sometimes beat that number 1 spot and you’ll pay a much lower premium.

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Google Explains “How Search Works”

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Google has been fighting spam with algorithms and manual penalties, but the best tool this whole time may have been information. Google has offered Webmaster Guidelines for ages now, but there has still been quite a bit of misinformation as to how exactly search works. Those who don’t spend their time reading tech and internet books, blogs, and websites probably don’t have any idea how search works.

As Search Engine Journal pointed out on Friday, Google has heightened their resolution towards open information with an infographic entitled How Search Works. The infographic is broad and won’t give a lot of new information towards exactly what search signals are being favored or what the best methods are (that’s what the Webmaster Guidelines are for after all) but the infographic will be very helpful to those who may not understand how Google handles indexing the entire internet.

What may be of some interest to SEOs and other internet professionals is the additional information Google released along with the unveil of How Search Works, including Search Quality Rating Guidelines, charts of what type of spam they have been removing, and how often Google gets Reconsideration Requests. Even when they don’t give a lot of specifics, any information directly from Google is always great for those of us trying to make our websites fit their requirements as well as possible.

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Time Savers For Managing Your AdWords Account

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Wrist Watch

Your daily schedule is pretty tightly booked. Usually, trying to cram in some time to optimize your AdWords campaigns to get the most out of your online advertising budget is pretty low on the list of priorities. But, if you put in a little time upfront, you can run an efficient and effective campaign for just minutes a day.

That’s the premise that Ben Cohen works from in his article for Business2Community. He’ll tell you where to allocate your precious time and how to set up your account so you can manage it quickly and get on to your other duties. If you have an AdWords account already, you understand how valuable this information could be. If you’ve been hesitant to start an account because it is so time consuming, this could be just what you need to get started.

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AdWords Looks To Increase Mobile Revenue

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Smartphone

AdWords’ cost-per-click has fallen over the last five quarters. Perhaps that’s why there recent efforts have been to enhance their keyword advertising with respects to mobile users.

As Steven Musil reports for CNet, Google’s AdWords Enhanced Campaign seeks to simplify advertiser’s experience when dealing with multiple device platforms. As with most advertising platforms, there is still a mystery surrounding how to get mobile users, on tablets and smart phones, to click ads the way desktop and laptop users will.

The AdWords Enhanced Campaign also includes ad copy, links and extensions for mobile optimized ads. Ideally, this is an update that helps both advertisers and Google without sacrificing user experience, but that may be too idealistic to hope for.

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Google Documents For All Your SEO Needs

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DocumentsOne of the best parts of the SEO online community is how happy everyone is to share their knowledge, tips, strategies, and tools for others to use. Maybe it is because some of the best SEO practices actually involve sharing information, and we all get into a habit of being genuinely happy to help others out, or maybe nearly everyone in SEO is just happy to share the knowledge, but for all SEO’s problems, lack of information isn’t one of them.

While blogs tend to be the go-to source for public sharing of information, there are also lots of documents passed around “behind the scenes” through Google Documents. It isn’t that they are secretive, but most of these documents are only found by those who directly ask experts for information, or those who explore some of the more technical minded blogs. Search Engine Journal isn’t where you would normally expect to find many of these documents, but Benjamin Beck shared some of the most helpful Google Docs that he has found while working in SEO.

One Google Doc by Annie Cushing is a well organized list for just about every tool out there for keyword research, SEO analysis, and numerous other areas of SEO you will ding helpful. Other documents, like the one from Stoked SEO help make link prospecting easier by scaling the prospecting on queries that have initial positive results. No matter what your needs are, there is likely a document in Beck’s list that will help.

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Google Isn’t Releasing Unnanounced Penguin Updates

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A recent Google Webmaster Hangout seems to have implied that Google is pushing out Penguin Updates without announcing them. Penguin has only been officially updated twice after its initial release, and the last update was in October 2012. In the video, John Meuller from Google makes it appear that Google has been updating Penguin on a regular basis but has not announced them all. The comments come at around the four minute mark in the video below.

When asked for clarification by Search Engine Land, Meuller says that he was referring to general “link analysis” refreshes, but does not include the Penguin algorithm. They also confirmed the last update was the one announced in October.

One of the reasons some questioned if Penguin was being refreshed is Panda, the update always mentioned in association with Penguin, has been updated on roughly a monthly basis. Google didn’t confirm another update is coming, but the updates have been coming steadily, and there are signs a new one should arrive in the next few days.

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More Conversions For Less Money With AdWords

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The simple goal for your AdWords campaign should be to get the most conversions possible while spending the least money possible. If you have a good ratio here, you’re likely doing everything right. However, there are plenty of potential pitfalls to avoid in order to lose out on conversions or spend way too much in getting them.

Check out Patrick McDaniel’s tips at Business2Community and find out if you could be saving money somewhere or getting more out of your campaigns.

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The Best SEO Strategy For The New Google

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It is impossible to understate just how quickly SEO changes and how important it is to keep up. Strategies change, and search engines update countless times. Google’s Penguin and Panda updates are clearly the most talked about, but Google has had plenty of other updates with less catchy names throughout the last year, like the Knowledge Graph (okay, that one has a catchy name too).

Penguin and Panda changed the landscape of searching completely and strategies have had to adapt to them quickly, though SEOs not taking advantage of gray area SEO tactics like link buying were mostly unaffected. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have to follow the new guidelines as well.

Most of these guidelines are more broad however, but Don Pathak, writer for Search Engine Journal, tried to simplify and explain them, and in doing so came out with a few specific points.

Many writers, usually with vested interests, have argued that SEO success can’t be done with just great content, and it is true to an extent that the internet is competitive to the point where great content doesn’t quite get you to the top search result. However, Google has also made it very clear that it wants to favor the quality of content over SEO tactics. Keeping a site fresh and relevant will give you as much of a boost as any behind the scenes tweak can.

The new Google also favors locality, so if your business has a local presence in a marketplace, optimizing for that location will help customers find your service. You can get started by simply establishing a local profile on Google Places for Business, and encourage customers to give you reviews on the site.

SEO will likely always concern itself with the technical dealings behind the curtain of a website, but Google wants to give preference to those who operate valuable and well made websites, not those manipulating every loophole to get the market advantage. As with anything run mostly through algorithms, there will always be “hacks” or weaknesses, but rather than exploiting them as they open, it is better to just create a website with real value.

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AdWords for Video Gets An Analytics Make-Over

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AdWords for Video launched last August, but it took until earlier this month to tack on the much needed analytical tools that have become standard for regular, old AdWords for text.

As Katie Ingram reports for CMS Wire, AdWords for video has added 3 essential tools to help advertisers track who is experiencing their ads.

Reach and Frequency Reporting allows users to see how many unique viewers their ad has received, which seems like something that shouldn’t have taken 6-months to include.

Column Sets takes a company’s marketing goals and shows them relevant metrics to reach said goal. Users can use default columns, such as Website and Conversions or Views and Audience, or make their own out of the available metrics.

GeoMap simply shows where viewers of your ad are located. None of these are groundbreaking inventions, but rather relevant and useful tools to help make AdWords for Video as effective and popular as the original flavor.

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Matt Cutts Explains Why Google Still Supports The PageRank Feature

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Last week, Matt Cutts responded to a question he receives fairly regularly concerning the PageRank feature in the Google toolbar. Specifically, why haven’t they removed it? It is apparent that many believe that the PageRank feature is “widely used by link sellers as a link grading system.”

There is, of course, some truth to this. While spammers do take advantage of the PageRank system, Cutts says that it is still relevant to many others. “There are a lot of SEO’s and people in search who look at the PageRank toolbar, but there are a ton of regular users as well.” Apparently, many internet users see the PageRank feature as indicative of reputability  and Google doesn’t plan on forcing them to stop.

That doesn’t mean PageRank is here to stay forever. While Google plans to keep supporting it so long as it is relevant to their users, it is telling that Chrome does not have the PageRank feature built into Chrome. Now, IE 10 is disavowing add ons, meaning Google’s toolbar will no longer work with the browser.

Considering that Internet Explorer was the only browser supporting the Google toolbar, it is highly likely the PageRank feature, as well as the toolbar as a whole, will fade away before long. As Matt Cutts puts it, “the writing is on the wall” that the new iteration of IE could be the end of PageRank, but we will have to wait and see.

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