Tag Archive for: Google

AdWords’ Subtle Upsell

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To perform well in online marketing, you have to use Google. AdWords is far and away the best option available and you’re handicapping your efforts if you’re not using it. Unfortunately, Google understands this fact also. This means that as more and more advertisers rely on AdWords, Google can bleed more and more money from their budgets.

Joel Chudleigh has an in-depth look at the various ways Google encourages you to spend more for online advertising at Business2Community, but I’ll give you a quick synopsis.

Basically, Google has been able to develop innovative new ways for your ad to get noticed and ways for you to track how well your campaigns are performing, but has included in this innovations an urging to spend more to get more. This is not an indictment of Google, but rather a statement of fact.

Of course Google will readily show you click-through and conversion rates of ads that display at the top of search results as compared to your ads because they want you to bid up to capture those top spots. That’s just one example of AdWords’ service subtly prompting you to feed more into your ad budget.

Google has cleverly created a competitive landscape for advertisers where the highest bid receives the most views and clicks. For advertisers, there’s no choice but to play along.

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Google Display Network Updates and Tips

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You can never stop learning when it comes to online marketing. Google’s Display Network is constantly being updated and you have to stay current in order to best utilize the tools at your disposal.

To help you do just that, check out Matt Van Wagner’s column at SearchEngineLand. He’s got the rundown of the latest updates and how they can help you.

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Google Rankings: Fair and Balanced

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When it comes to improving organic search rankings, business owners will do anything to get ahead. That’s why so many wonder whether using AdWords and being paying Google customers will help their rankings or not. Matt Cutts, Google’s Web Spam boss, says it does not.

Cutts participated in a Google Webmaster Q&A in October and explained that Google attempts to be as fair and even as possible, regardless who they’re dealing with. This means that those that pay for AdWords and those that don’t get equal treatment.

Check out some of Cutts Q&A session at the iNeedHits blog.

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The Basics of Good Local SEO

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Every topic I cover can be as complicated as you let them be. With the focus on minute data and snippets of code, SEO could easily be intimidating for anyone trying to get started learning.

This is a problem for local SEO because most business owners aren’t experts. If they think of local SEO as a daunting field, rather than seeing the opportunities it could open up for them, they are likely to shy away.

With this in mind, I’d like to take us back to the basics. We haven’t covered local SEO here in depth, so this will serve as a great place to begin exploring the topic. But, the tips offered here are valuable for broader SEO as well.

For good local SEO, there are really three major rules.

  • Get your website up to standards
  • Spread your business details everywhere
  • Use social media to get your customers to do promotion for you

Getting your website up to standard

Google is beginning to combine regular and local search results, and your website quality helps decide where you will land in the local search results, as well as more broad searches. Making a quality site relies on you doing a few specific things. For one, your site should have a clear and functional structure with a set heirarchy of pages. This will help Google’s crawlers go where you want them too, and know what is most important.

Another, more basic step in making a good page is just filling your site to the brim with quality content. Your content makes your first impression to customers as well as search engines. Putting out continuous good content keeps bringing search crawlers back to your page, and generate backlinks to your site from other pages.

Spread your business details

This one is quick and easy, so I’m going to let Myles Anderson from Search Engine Land sum it up. “Having your correct business details widely available is positive for local SEO and sets you up nicely to take advantage of the mobile-boom. Many of the same data sources which feed the desktop internet also feed mobile sites and applications so even if your website isn’t mobile enabled your business will appear on popular mobile applications.”

This is especially true for local SEO because people are searching to be able to contact YOU. Make it easy for them. Google will reward you for it. But don’t get lazy once your information is out there. Remember where you have put it by keeping a record. If you ever move, or change phone numbers, you will need to go change it everywhere the old information is.

Be social!

Just like everywhere else online, Google is becoming more and more intertwined with social media. If you don’t have a social media account for your business, it is time to get one. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ are all very influential in your SEO status. From there, make it easy to share your content from your site with social media buttons prominently connected with content. Once you have a following, you will notice they share content for you. You still have to be proactive by sharing your content with them on social media in the first place, but if you connect with your followers, you will be shocked to see what they do for you.

Conclusion

Of course, there are a ton more things you can do to help give yourself a boost. It is high time you have a mobile optimized page for your site, and it is important to make sure you are listed on Google and Apple Maps. But, these first three rules will help you easily expand, and see what investing in local SEO can do for you.

 

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Don’t Be Afraid of the EMD Update

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Another week, another Google update. This time around it is an EMD, or “Exact Match Domain” update.

So how does it effect you? What did the update do? What does it all mean?

Mainly, this update means bad news for spam. Many in the SEO community were frightened the EMD update would go through and destroy every exact match search result on the web, but that is far from the truth.

This update doesn’t ruin exact matches, but looks for signs of spammy abuse of the system. Alex Becker over at Search Engine Journal has a full explanation of the update and how it effects all of those spammers out there, but the important message is clear. No, the EMD update should not hurt you, if you are following all of the suggested guidelines.

 

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Real World Example of AdWords’ Importance

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Meet Paul Downes. He owns his own woodworking shop, which specialized in cabinets and conference tables. He contributes regularly to the New York Times small business blog and recently shared a crisis that surely will or has affected many small business owners.

Paul added a low-cost alternative to his line of conference tables after receiving a number of inquiries from school’s and non-profits. He then added ads in AdWords to get the word out about his new product and started selling quite a few of them.

However, he eventually saw an overall drop in his monthly sales even with this increase in new product sales. The problem was not with a failing economy, as he initially told himself.

Instead, Paul put some thought into his problem. He discovered that the calls for these low-cost, new tables mostly came early in the business day. Calls from big corporations, who are responsible for purchasing the higher-priced models that garner Paul bigger profits, usually came later in the day.

After poking around on AdWords, Paul found that his campaign wasn’t showing his ads for the higher priced tables to the audience that would buy them. Instead, AdWords was optimizing for conversions and the low-cost option was getting good conversions.

Paul made the simple fix of splitting the two products into their own campaign so he could get the most out of his budget. This is a real life example of the importance of paying close attention to your AdWords campaigns. Paul has since seen his sales steadily rise back to normal, but he will be playing catch-up for the rest of the year. Thankfully, he had the metrics available to fix a problem that was crippling his company.

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The 5 Most Common Mistakes on Landing Pages

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You can do a lot of different things with landing pages, be it selling something, encouraging visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, or trying to get people to sign a petition. No matter which of these goals you have, you are ultimately trying to get visitors to perform an action.

Making a great landing page seems like it should be easy, but it is more complex than you may think. This leads to poor sales because a landing page is only working if it is getting people to convert.

With that in mind, let’s examine the most common problems with landing pages.

  1. Mismatching Text Ad Copy and Landing Page Headline – There are numerous reasons you should make sure your Google AdWords text ads match your landing page headline. For users, the text ad creates an expectation, and you don’t want to confuse your visitors or make them feel mislead. The quality of your landing page also decides cost-per-click in AdWords, so if you raise your quality score, you will lower your cost-per-click.
  2. Poor Grammar and Misspelled Words – Throwing up a quick landing page is always a terrible idea because it leads to a ton of smaller problems. One of those is bad spelling and grammar. This is one of those mistakes that just shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Your visitors will take any reason you give them to not convert, and this one is a big reason to leave.
  3. No Trust Signals – To get visitors to convert, you have to establish trust. You can build this into your landing page in just a few ways. If you establish your brand’s popularity, people will view it as credible. You can also present your 3rd party certifications with organizations like Verisign or the Better Business Bureau. You can also establish trust by making positive mentions of your brand in the press easily available on the landing page.
  4. Lack of Good Call-to-Actions – You’re call to actions are important to help make people convert. They should also be compelling, with practical language, and solid, consistent design. You should also keep it short, between 90 and 150 characters. You need to make it clear what you want the visitor to do, but short enough to keep their attention.
  5. Poor Quality Videos or Images – Videos on your landing page can help boost conversion rates by about 80%. Images don’t raise conversions that much, but they still have their own positive effect on visitor activity. This doesn’t mean you can just toss up any image or video you want however. Poor quality images or videos will actually lower conversion rates rather than improve them.

Eric Siu from Unbounce has even more common mistakes, but these will help get you started with making sure users are converting. Remember, if users aren’t converting, your landing page has problems.

 

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Don’t Scare Away Customers By Over Marketing

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There are so many options to personalize and remarket ads to your potential customers online, you may actually be annoying those consumers and driving them away. No one wants to see ads tailored to them on every site they visit, all asking them to come back and buy a product they browsed for hours ago.

So, David Rodnitzky put together a list at Search Engine Land, which should help you be a fine-tuned marketer, not an annoying, stalker type. Here’s a look:

1. Attribution

Because you’re using so many vehicles to get your message across, you need to know which ones are working and how well they’re working. Attribution tracking allows you to discover how a consumer got to your site, but it’s a pricey service.

2. Frequency Caps

You can use the attribution data to find out what is superfluous in your advertising strategy. Limit the number of times users see your ads on a given channel based on how well those ads work and how they work in combination with your other campaigns.

3. Change your creative

With the data you’re collecting, you can discover what stage users typically are when they see specific ads. Use that knowledge to tailor your ads content and message. Ads for users who are early in the process can be about awareness, while ads for users later in their shopping process can be focused on conversions.

4. Risk v Reward

Consider how many consumers you will alienate with ads when looking at how many more conversions you could get. If you run some ads more to get a slight increase in conversions, you may also be increasing the number of consumers who swear off your site because of over-bearing ads.

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Adwords Will Soon ‘Optimize for Conversions’ By Default

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Adwords is making some dramatic changes once again. In October, Google brought back the ‘Rotate Indefinitely’ option for campaigns even though they didn’t recommend the option themselves. Now, Google will be making campaigns not set to ‘rotate indefinitely’ default to ‘optimize for conversions’.

As posted to the iNeedHits blog, Google estimates the change will increase conversions by 5-percent across the board. With the ‘optimize for conversions’ option, Google will dynamically change bids from advertisers to run ads with the greatest chance of creating a conversion.

Users who prefer to ‘optimize’ manually can do so by using the ‘Conversion Optimizer’ and ‘Enhanced CPC’ tools, which can track advertising bids likely to lead to conversion and ensure ads with high chances of conversion are being shown the most without an increse in budget.

Google will make the change the week of November 12th. This means that you’ll need to do your homework before then to make sure your campaigns aren’t automatically switched to something you don’t want.

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Matt Cutts Says Google Now Reports 100 Percent of Manual Actions

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Have you ever wondered if your site was penalized by Google through automated algorithms or a real human person? Now, you will almost always know because Google reports almost 100 percent of manual penalties.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, described this new policy at Pubcon this year, saying, “We’ve actually started to send messages for pretty much every manual action that we do that will directly impact the ranking of your site.”

“If there’s some manual action taken by the manual web spam team that means your web site is going to rank directly lower in the search results, we’re telling webmasters about pretty much all of those situations.”

Cutts did clarify that there may be rare instances where this doesn’t occur, but their aim to get to 100-percent.

In June, at SMX Advanced, Cutts gave a figure of 99 percent reporting, but Cutt believes they are currently reporting every instance of manual actions.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has more information about the distinction between manual and algorithmic actions.

 

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