Just a quick post. I put a tip on DailySEOTip about Google AdWords’s Quality Score. I tried to make it short and sweet, although you do need to understand all of the acronyms (CTR, CPC, etc.) to understand it fully.
I do think it’s worth understanding because of the fact it can make a difference between a $0.30 click and a $5.00 click (seriously). So if you use AdWords at ALL, learn about it – if not from me, then somewhere else, but it’s definitely worth investigating.
It’s been mentioned previously that AdWords has been going through some serious changes. Well, it appears that they are also stepping up in their quality check on their advertisers. Google has taken action by banning some of their advertisers that don’t meet up to standards – permanently.
This is quite major news for several advertisers. These bans are hitting hard, and the first major revision on AdWords users and who Google will accept was done yesterday, December 3rd. The Search Engine Roundtable has more information and a good copy of the ban letter that they published today.
Google does, in fact, have a customer support line: 866-2GOOGLE. However, this line is intended primarily for AdWords, and encourages all other questions to be handled online (somehow that doesn’t surprise me).
One thing that happened sometime earlier this year is that Google stopped personally supporting most AdWords accounts. So if you call in, indicate you are calling about AdWords help, and put in your account number – chances are you’ll get a message that will tell you they no longer offer personal support, to go online to find your answers in the AdWords online support.
However – if you have certain elements meeting a particular criteria in your account, you can still get personal support. From what I’ve been able to find out from Google, this criteria is based primarily on ad expenditure. That is to say – Google takes care of their big spenders, the advertisers who in turn take care of Google. By giving them a ton of money.
This is not the happiest of news for all AdWords users, but hopefully it does clear things up. As far as I can tell, if you have an AdWords Client Center account set up (have Google AdWords Qualification, etc.), they will also offer support. I do not know if this is purely because you have that type of an account or because you are in charge of so many clients that spend a combined amount above their “trigger” figure. I personally am able to get through to customer service, for one of these reasons or the other.
To sum it up – if you want Google support for AdWords, your best bet (unless you’re spending thousands a month or have a Client Center account) is to just go to their support center online, the AdWords Help Center. They do have a lot of information there that covers most topics, so for the most part this is a great resource. Although, admittedly, not as nice (for some people) as being able to just ask someone to help you out in real-time. But you can ask through their contact forms online, if you can’t find your solution in their help center.
It seems like the focus for a lot of internet marketers is finding that top trafficked keyword. However, this can be a mistake by not focusing on the true marketing involved. In some cases, the top traffic keyword is not one that will bring conversions.
Putting focus purely on the traffic numbers for keyword research is the reason many internet marketers are not able to pull the profit numbers many others do. Making sure you focus on the consumer and their intent more than the pure traffic size is key.
This can be done more quickly using PPC, but at a price. And in SEO, solid keyword research must be done to target proper keywords – a mistake here will cost a lot of time and money.
Evan LaPointe goes into a bit more detail about all of these factors at Search Engine Land. At any rate, it’s good to remember that the focus should be on the human experience, not just the analytics numbers.
More people are learning about the changes that came with the latest Google AdWords update. One example that I think is a major one is the update combining Google AdWords with Google Local (also posted on DailySEOTip), but there are a few other changes that are visible.
One of the other changes that I haven’t touched on yet is the adding of the Google Merchant account details to AdWords ads. This can actually add product listings into your Google AdWords ad. Videos are also being seen inside ads, as well.
Images of all of these can be found in a post on Search Engine Land. For a lot of people, the way to take advantage of these are very easy, and are very worthwhile.
Pay for link building? What? Yes, the different ways people do their link building vary from totally free to exorbitantly expensive, but one method a lot of people have not really considered is actually sending traffic that will build links to pages that deserve them.
There are different ways to use PPC to target your landing pages, but if you have good enough content you can use the traffic you attract to help create more links. The cost will vary based on the keyword you choose, but in some cases this can be very beneficial for your SEO.
Julie Joyce at Search Engine Land has 8 tips to help you fine-tune this approach.
Google AdWords has had an update recently, and it now appears you can actually advertise and have your address appear on Google Maps with your ad:
Example of AdWords on Google Maps
This involves having Google Local set up (also known as Local Business Center). If you don’t know how to do this, you can check out my earlier post on putting your business on Google Maps.
Once you have a business account set up and associated with the same address you have on your AdWords account, you can get your ad to show up on Google Maps by editing your Campaign settings and then under Locations, open the “Show relevant addresses with your ads (advanced)” option.
AdWords Campaign Setup
Here the easy way to do it is to choose the first option, which is to select your Google Local Business Center account, which will put your address information into your ad and also put a matching blue “pushpin” on Google Maps for you.
The alternate choice you have (if you don’t have an associated Google Local account set up) is to put in the address and phone number manually, in the second option here. This will also display this information with your ad.
Keep in mind, the only way this will work is if the keyword that is being searched on is relevant to the locality your address is in. For example, a city name. (Just the way Google Maps normally appears in search results.) If your keywords match this type of query, then your address and phone number will appear with your ad, in addition to a little point on Google Maps. And this is great news for anyone who does local advertising.
It looks like with the latest AdWords update, they’re starting to put any local advertisements in Google AdWords into Google Maps. You can see images of some examples of that here, in Search Engine Land.
The ads appear almost the same as Google Local listings, only with blue numbered pushpins instead of red lettered pushpins. I’ll most definitely have to look further into AdWords to see exactly how to take advantage of this new update.
When doing SEO, one of the most underutilized tools I know of is actually Google AdWords. The benefits of how running an AdWords campaign can help SEO in various ways are numerous, and a lot of straight SEOs aren’t even aware of it.
Dave Davis of Redfly is a PPC pro, and he covers the crossover nicely in this post.
So Google made a few major updates this last weekend to AdWords. I manage several different accounts, so I’ve seen first-hand what kind of impact this has had.
First of all, they updated the AdWords Editor – a great tool, by the way, I highly recommend it. You can find it here: AdWords Editor. But yeah, they made a few tweaks, in particular I noticed changes to the Campaigns tab. You can now affect the ad schedule from here, location changes, so forth. And if I remember right, the “Keyword Opportunities” option in the Keywords tab is new, as well. It’s the Google machine offering suggestions on keywords that might be relevant to your ad group.
The other big change I saw was Quality Score. The Quality Score on a lot of my keywords dropped. In some cases, heavily. Google is getting tighter when it comes to looking at relevance between keywords, ads, and landing pages. In particular, the landing page. The average QS used to be around 7, you had to be pretty far off to drop much below that.
Well now I’m seeing an average closer to 5, and only very relevant pages are getting 7 or higher. A page has to be completely relevant and contain a lot of solid info (as well as be on a high quality site) to get a 9 or 10 now.
Not sure how this will affect advertisers, but it may be interesting to watch. It does mean that I’ll have to be a lot more careful with the quality of pages I point my ads to. I recommend you do the same.
