Web Data Source » PPC

A Beginner’s Guide to Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Manish Pandey — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:00:38 +0000

Pay Per Click or PPC is among the most popular of all web-marketing tools. It is nothing but a small two or three line text advertisement which contains keywords and phrases. These small advertisements are usually found on the right side of search pages on leading search engines. Quite often one or two links are also highlighted on search pages. These links are termed ‘sponsored links’ and can be seen in leading search engines such as Google, MSN Live and Yahoo. These sponsored links are nothing but PPC advertisements.

The three entities involved in PPC advertising are the visitor, the host that carries the advertisement and the advertiser, who has advertised a product or service on the host website, usually a leading search engine. In this form of advertising, advertisers have to bid on keywords and phrases. Whenever someone searches a product or service using certain keywords, the search result page will feature those advertisements which contain the keywords using which the visitor actually searched in the first place.

The internet is fast becoming the battle ground for business to garner their share of the market. With increasing internet usage, people around the world are searching for all sorts of products and services online these days. It has therefore become important for almost every business to have a significant online presence. Merely having an online presence though will not guarantee business. Websites need to attract traffic and this is where PPC advertising steps in.

PPC advertising is growing rapidly at a mind boggling pace. Its popularity can be gauged from the fact that out of the total amount of money that is spent on search engine advertising, a whopping 81% is spent on PPC advertising. These figures do not come as a surprise to those businesses that have benefited from PPC advertising. There are several success stories of businesses that have been able to make the most out of PPC advertising campaigns.

The key reasons for the popularity of PPC advertising include:

The risk involved is low since the investment is minimal.
These advertising programs are fast to implement when compared to other media.
Advertisers can manipulate ad positions and also control costs with them.
Instantaneous results are a good possibility with PPC advertising.
PPC advertisements give an opportunity for businesses to test their products for online marketing feasibility.

PPC: A Brief History

Contrary to popular perception PPC advertisements are not a recent phenomenon. They have been in existence for well over a decade now. The term was increasingly heard during the mid 1990s when the dotcom boom happened. One of the companies that pioneered the concept was goto.com which later on was rechristened Overture. In 2003 Yahoo took over Overture. The actual PPC scene began to see hectic activities once Google launched its ‘Ad Words solution to PPC. Almost every major search engine is into this form of advertising these days.

The minimum price for click which is popularly referred to as ‘cost per click’ varies from one search engine to another. It also depends on the competition involved for a particular keyword list or phrase. It is for this reason that particular keywords and phrases are known to cost more on leading search engines.

Steps Involved in an Effective PPC Advertising Campaign

Although PPC advertising can look a relatively simple process, there are several issues that you will need to deal with once you decide on an advertising campaign. From choosing the right keywords to designing an attractive landing page, you will need to take care of several aspects.

A PPC Ad.
Several businesses have taken advantage of PPC advertising to make profits. With proper planning, you can implement a meaningful PPC advertising campaign, which can in turn mean more profits to your business. Let us look at the steps involved in making an effective PPC advertising campaign.

Selection of the appropriate keywords or phrases is the first step involved in PPC advertising. Remember, keywords and phrases are the cornerstones of success in a PPC advertising campaign. They are the foundation on which the entire campaign is built upon and developed. If you are already advertising on other media, then you also need to ensure that your PPC advertising campaign also complements them too.
Before you implement your PPC advertising campaign, you must first of all decide your budget. Proper planning will ensure that you do not overspend, while at the same time get effective results from your advertising campaign.
You must be clear as to who your target consumers are. This way you will ensure that you reach potential consumers through effective advertisements.
One way to target your target consumers would be to decide on a niche. Even if your niche market were to be small, a well directed and created PPC advertising campaigns can work wonders for your niche business area.
It is not enough if you just advertise and then assume that it would be effective in getting more business. You should constantly monitor your PPC advertising campaign. Always remember that the internet is a dynamic place, where things change very fast. You therefore need to make sure that your PPC campaign is in tune with the changing trends.
You must have a close look at statistical reports that are associated with your online advertising campaign. This will help you gauge the effectiveness of your PPC advertising campaign.
The best way to go about creating a PPC advertising campaign would be to hire the services of professionals. This is so because they will be experienced in creating the right copy or content for your PPC advertisement. A well written and concise copy can make the difference between success and failure in a PPC advertising campaign.
Along with working on your PPC advertisement, you should also simultaneously make sure that your website is attractive and easy to navigate, since your PPC advertisement will be leading web visitors to your website.

This form of advertising ensures a win-win situation of all the parties involved and it is no wonder that it is growing at a rapid rate. With increasing internet connections, the future holds immense possibilities for PPC advertising.

Ten Copywriting Tips for B2B SEO

Galen DeYoung — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:28:42 +0000

B2B copywriting is tough stuff. Instead of, “Wipes clean with a damp cloth,” you may find yourself trying to simultaneously explain and extol the virtues of some complex mechanical system while being creative and persuasive at the same time. Copywriting for B2B SEO is even tougher. Here are ten tips to help you succeed.

Watch the lingo
Make sure to use generic terms on the page. In most cases, B2B searchers are more likely to use generic terms than brand names. Proprietary brand names tend to be unusual, so searchers Googling for one of your brand names will likely find your site quite easily. Go ahead and use the brand name in copy, but make sure you also include the generic terms just as much, if not more.

Keep page copy focused
Search engines attempt to discern the topical focus of the page. Don’t confuse them. Keep the content of a given page focused on the page’s keyword strategy. If you have multiple topics, better to put them on multiple pages. Don’t try to use a single page to go after numerous unrelated keywords.

Remember the long tail
Before you even start to write copy for a given page, you better know the likely long-tail words B2B searchers may also include in their queries. While the keyword focus of the page may be “conveyor systems,” your target prospect for that page may also be entering words like “distribution”, “sortation”, and “full-case” when they’re searching for a solution to their problems. Good B2B SEO copyrighting seamlessly includes these long-tail words.

Watch the word order
In some cases, word order doesn’t matter for PPC. In SEO, however, word order matters a lot. Obviously, you don’t want to create stilted copy, but if your keyword research shows that “LTL shipping” is more popular than “shipping LTL,” make sure you use the more popular word order more prevalently in your copy.

Watch singular and plural usage
Whether you treat a keyword in copy as singular or plural makes a difference. When you search for “healthcare consultants” and for “healthcare consultant”, you’ll often get different results even in the top three to five results on Google. Know which keyword you’re going after, and write copy accordingly. (This goes for other things, too, like title tags.)

Long copy is good
In B2B, long copy is a good thing. It gives you the opportunity to explain attributes and benefits that aren’t readily apparent. It gives you the opportunity to differentiate your company’s products and services. Longer copy is also good for the search engines. It gives them a better opportunity to assess the focus of the page and the depth of information on the page. When you write long copy, however, remember to also break it up with keyword-rich headers and tag them with H1 or H2 tags.

Keep page headers keyword-rich
Creative, engaging, keyword-rich B2B headlines are tough to write, even for some of the best B2B copywriters. If you’ve got a creative, engaging, persuasive headline, but it isn’t keyword-rich, make sure you use other tactics on the page. In some cases, you may want to stylize the creative headline and put it in an image. If so, write keyword-rich ALT text for this headline image, and put the “generic” headline somewhere else on the page and code it with an H1 tag. The site visitor will get the impact of the visual headline, and the search engine will get the right idea about the content and focus of the page.

Include captions for images
Text-based captions are a great way to get more keyword-rich copy on the page. Many consumer products don’t require captions; a picture of a red Polo shirt is pretty self-explanatory. The nature of business-to-business products, however, is typically not readily apparent simply from a picture. Whether it’s a single line or a short paragraph, write captions for your images. Make sure you include keywords in the captions, and that those keywords match the keyword strategy of each page. Good B2B copywriting uses captions as another opportunity to sell to the prospect and another opportunity to influence search results.

Write with anchor text in mind
Internal linking is a good thing. It helps robots find other content on your site. And the anchor text you use for text links can help with SEO. Before you start writing, know what pages you could or should link to from the copy you’re about to write. Then determine what the optimal anchor text should be for each link. Once you know the optimal anchor text, you can incorporate it seamlessly into copy. If you wait until the site is done to do text-based internal linking, you’ll have to edit the copy you previously wrote. Good B2B copywriting flows smoothly through the desired anchor text.

Customize ALT tags to the page
Although not visible copy, ALT text is important. First, make sure you actually create ALT tags for images. Then, if you use the same image more than once on the site, make sure you vary the text. Most B2B companies don’t have rich image libraries. Accordingly, they tend to frequently use the images they do have. Too often, if an image is used multiple times throughout a site, no one thinks to alter the ALT tags; usually the web designer will simply copy the ALT text from another page where the image already resides. If you have the same image on more than one page, customize the ALT text according to the keyword strategy for that page. For instance, the same image may be used on a page whose keyword focus is “material handling systems” and on a page whose keyword focus is “conveyor systems.” Make sure the ALT text matches the keyword focus of the respective page.

The SEO Failings of Major UK Highstreet Retailers

Tom_C — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:27:21 +0000

Posted by Tom_C

I recently read a couple of posts on e-consultancy about the state of play with major UK retail brands and how they perform online. First was 10 things Asda could do better online, which while I enjoyed didn’t touch on any of the SEO failings of these companies. Kevin’s Supermarkets ignoring SEO for major keywords post touched more on SEO which was nice but I wanted to go into a few more meaty things so here’s my review of the state of play with SEO for major UK highstreet retailers.

While the point of this post is to highlight common mistakes and not to call out individual brands, inevitably I’ve mentioned specific names as examples. This isn’t an attempt to cause offence and I appreciate that even if you know what the right answer is it can be difficult to implement using legacy systems.

Keyphrase Targeting

Who said keyphrases were important? Sometimes you’re just too cool for school. Don’t listen to all those other guys telling you how important keyphrases are – surely it can’t be that important can it?

Ignoring the fact that you can’t find the Boots website on the first page of Google.co.uk for a [boots] search take a look at their make-up page. Their title tag reads, and I quote:

Well I could think of a few improvements there…. The most amusing/crushingly depressing (delete as appropriate) thing about this is that many of these brands are paying a lot of money for PPC campaigns while at the same time ignoring organic traffic. Waterstones for example bid on the term [cookery books]:

And they have a perfect landing page for a cookery books search, the only problem is that their title tag for the page (and in fact every page on their site) is as follows:

Ah. I see. Not interested in the free traffic then, those pesky raggamuffin organic visitors always screwing up my analytics, BUYING THINGS and what not. Such a pain in the neck.

Homepage Redirects

This problem happens an unbelievable amount. Take a look at the following pages:

http://www.halfords.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10151

http://www.missselfridge.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?storeId=12554&catalogId=20555

http://www.topshop.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?storeId=12556&catalogId=19551

Want a quick and easy way of reaching those URLs? Try clicking on these links:

http://www.halfords.com

http://www.missselfridge.com

http://www.topshop.com

Yep – that’s right, all those nasty URLs are the default URLs you get redirected to when you visit the domain. Sheesh. Sometimes this redirect is a 301 but it’s not uncommon to see redirects through a 302, meta-refresh, or javascript!

Note that a clean, user-friendly homepage URL helps users AND search engines. You can bet that this is causing more than a few indexing issues for some of these sites.

URLs, URLs, URLs

Along the same lines as the above point – nasty URLs abound on these websites. Take a look at a few of these non-semantic, non-keyphrase-rich, un-usable URLs:

http://online.vodafone.co.uk/dispatch/Portal/appmanager/vodafone/wrp?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=templateBlank&pageID=VIRTUAL_HOME (Vodafone homepage)

http://www.burton.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?beginIndex=0&viewAllFlag=&catalogId=20553&storeId=12551&categoryId=113901&parent_category_rn=&productId=720470&langId=-1 (Burton cardigan page – just for you Ciaran)

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/4061423/c_1/1|category_root|Kitchen+and+laundry|10198386/c_2/2|cat_10198386|Vacuum+cleaners|10198408.htm (Argos vacuum cleaner page)

And my personal favourite – the curry’s “washing machines” page:

http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/store/cur_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@0738042494.1222078553@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccekadefejmhgddcflgceggdhhmdgmi.0&page=ProductList&category_oid=-30549&fm=4&sm=0&tm=0&show_all=true

Compare this to Comet’s page for washing machines:

http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/category/49/Washing-Machines

Now, take a wild guess as to which one ranks top 5 in Google for a [washing machines] search…. Hint: it’s not Currys (though Currys do pay for PPC on the term washing machines)

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can crop up in many different guises – from URL parameters to having more than one domain resolving to the content. Mostly this won’t hurt you too much unless of course you happen to pass internal link juice to both versions – then you’re in trouble. For example, look at the following two product pages, both of which have internal links pointing to them. It’s the same page (almost) only the breadcrumb is different since the product is contained in multiple categories:

http://www.debenhams.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_10001_10001_64439_428661_-1

http://www.debenhams.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_10001_10001_63165_428661_-1

Information Architecture

If you get the information architecture wrong on a site then there’s often more implications than simply SEO as it often impacts your usability too. Consider the following situation:

http://search.next.co.uk/nav3/cat/02men/sub/ttoshirts/0

Now, ignoring the fact that we’ve somehow ended up on a sub-domain away from the main site, this is far as you can drill down on the site when looking at men’s tshirts. If you wanted to browse the tshirts you can sort by price but that’s it. There’s no option to sort by ‘designer’ or ‘poloshirt’ etc. By leaving these sub-sub-category pages from their site they make it difficult to browse tshirts as well as not having a page which is capable of ranking for ‘polo shirt’ (assuming of course that the rest of their site was well optimised).

Because Sometimes One URL Just Isn’t Enough

Since all of the brands I’m talking about are recognised by any UK citizen they obviously need to own all the different variations of their domain names. Once you own them however, you should always look to redirect them into the site. If you don’t then you can end up with duplicate content issues. For example, www.thecarphonewarehouse.com and www.carphonewarehouse.com both resolve to the same site.

Sometimes however this is taken one step further and there are two separate sites on multiple domains, serving the same content. Check out the difference between these two pages: littlewoods, littlewoods direct. It’s a good bet that if a user isn’t sure which version is more authoritative that the search engines will be struggling too.

And then finally we come to some situations which are presumably just mistakes, though that doesn’t make them any less critical. Try visiting http://www.bodyshop.com. Ideally you’d end up at http://www.thebodyshop.co.uk/ but not so!

While you might think that it’s no big deal, that domain has over 2000 links so you can be sure that they’ll be missing out on search engine rankings and visitors because of it!

Conversion Rate Optimisation

I’m not going to talk in too much depth here as e-consultancy has already done this quite a bit, but seriously guys – what were you thinking? A call to action to abandon my order? Are you insane?!

That’s ignoring the fact that I ended up with 7 pairs of jeans in my basket before I figured out how to actually get to the checkout. Other common mistakes include:

Not taking you straight to the basket when you add a product to your cart. Sure, it gets annoying every now and again but it’s a lot LESS annoying than spending 5 minutes trying to find your basket…

Forcing users to sign-up before they buy. The more forms the better. Fact.

Making the ‘buy-now’ button say something obscure like ‘register’. Because ‘buy-now’ just seemed a little too, oh I don’t know, effective?!

The below is a screenshot which fails both of these criteria – forcing you to sign up AND calling their buy-now button ‘register’:

Adding bright red text to the checkout pages which tells you how much you HAVEN’T saved with this purchase. Gee – thanks guys! These guys even tell you twice in red font that you’ve saved nothing:

Outstanding Award For Lack Of Interest In the Internet

And finally we come to some sites which just seem designed to confuse. There really is no explanation for this. Clarks, a major shoe retailer in the UK has one of the most bizarre and baffling websites I’ve ever come across from such a large brand. Even a list of a 100 or so online high street retailers went so far as to give Clarks the label of “difficult site”.

Entirely in flash, it took me one blocked pop-up, 10 clicks and a good few minutes waiting for various pages of the site to load before I found a shoe page (any shoe page!) which has a picture of a shoe and a price next to it. Great. Except that page has zero call to action. There’s not even a link to find your nearest offline shop, let alone a phone number to use their telephone ordering (which they have btw – there’s a call to action for telephone ordering from their homepage). Why spend so much money on a “nice” flash website which serves absolutely no purpose?

Honourable mention for this award of course goes to Tie Rack who’s website is 5 pages big and they have a call to action to email them to find out where your nearest offline shop is. EMAIL them?! Because sometimes searchable lists just don’t quite cut it:

Conclusion

I’ve learned from this post that huge UK brands are leaving money on the table with their online marketing and SEO efforts. Even though many of these companies will have paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for their site they still won’t be getting much organic traffic. The ones that ARE getting large amounts of organic traffic will be getting it almost entirely from branded search. Instead of going after non-branded organic traffic, many of these companies are allocating serious PPC budgets to drive traffic to their sites.

So where does the organic traffic end up? Well for most category searches such as “washing machines” or “men’s jeans” there’s a combination of brands who do enjoy some organic rankings (e.g. john lewis, tesco, comet) combined with online retailers (e.g. amazon) and online shopping portals (e.g. ciao, pricerunner).

At a conservative estimate I’d say that the UK highstreet is missing out on at least £100 million / year.

While this is obviously UK-focused, I’d love to hear a round-up of the US market – is it more advanced? Do they generallly get it ‘right’ more? Maybe Jane or Rebecca could fill in?

If you are reading this post and work for one of the brands mentioned in this post and are un-sure about your SEO strategy I STRONGLY recommend that you get some SEO advice. SEOmoz’s UK-based global associates or recommended partners would be a good place to start.

Update (after I’d written the post but before it was put live): Ciaran has written about how GAP fails in the UK online which I thought was pretty timely and relevant.

Google’s new Quality Score Improvements Analysed

Eloi — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:54:13 +0000

In case you haven’t read it yet, Google is now unleashing some new improvements to its Quality Score. News from Google about changes to their algorithms or the way they rank and charge PPC ads usually creates a tidal wave of blog posts, comments and outbursts from the community that uses AdWords on a daily basis. I therefore thought I’d analyse this new development and share thoughts & case studies with our readers.

Google announced:

“Since 2005, we’ve improved Quality Score in many ways, such as the inclusion of landing page quality and landing page load time as factors. Along the way, we’ve also received much helpful feedback from both users and advertisers.
Today, we’d like to let you know of further improvements we’ll introduce in the coming weeks — based, in part, on this feedback. First we’ll outline the key points, and then dive into the details:

Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query

Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’

‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account”

The idea behind having the quality score calculated for every single search is that it will make Google’s PPC results more relevant and time sensitive. For example, if you competitor writes a compelling ad which most of the traffic for a given keyword, your CTR will reduce, and Google will see you as less relevant in the next keyword auction.

I wanted to check that my long tail keywords were still being displayed, and this is what I discovered:

click to enlarge

For this keyword, I am in position 1.4 but my bid is not enough to display on the first page… I have to double it!

Furthermore, when I check the SERP for this keyword, there are no PPC ads out there. Not one. I would have thought Google wanted at least one PPC ads on every page to monetize their SERPs, but no, it prefers no ads at all… Could it be that the bid increase I need to get my keyword active again outweighs any other monetizing factor? I doubt it, I regard Google very highly.

OK, fair enough, I have had no click out of 28 impressions, I am not relevant enough to appear on the first page… I thought you’d give me at least 100 impressions before casting a judgement on me, but let’s move on.

Let’s have a look at this one:

click to enlarge

For this keyword displaying on average in position 3.6, I am getting a great CTR (7.27%) so I should be deemed relevant! But no, I am asked to “optimise my keywords and ads”. Or double my bid. (I think they mean the second option…). It’s only then that I remember what the Google Bible Blog said:

“First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search. They’re based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword.”

Tagging keywords with first page bid estimates instead of marking them inactive is a way for Google to keep all your keywords in play – especially the broad matches as they trigger for more Search Queries. Who knows, maybe your ads will start displaying again if your competitors stops using one of their high performing ad, and you might start receiving traffic and spending without knowing it.

So I went to have a look at my Keyword Diagnostic tool (which I have to say have been improved greatly by the new functionalities, but that’s another post) and here is what I found:

click to enlarge

Even though my bid is high enough to get position 3.6, and even though I am getting over 7% CTR, I am being told that I need a higher bid (optimisation guidelines have been followed as explained on the pic). So why base this Quality Score attribution on the exact match only?

Instead of giving you an indication of how low you can pay, Google will give you an indication of how high you have to pay. It’s like O2 saying “iPhone on contracts around £50″ instead of saying “iPhone with contracts starting at £35″.

In theory, first page bid estimates are a sweet metric – whether you are on page two and want an indication of how much you are willing to bid, or whether you are in position one and want to go down without loosing first page visibility. But the execution is poor, and the combination of the first page estimate with the dynamic Quality Score calculation can really caused your account harm if you are not careful.

On these topics, there will always be two school of thoughts:

The sceptics will say: “Google doesn’t give us enough impressions to deem us relevant or not” and “Google says my ad is not on page 1 but it’s in position 2.6 – this is an outrage!”

The purists will say: “It’s great to have Google inform you that your position 4 is not deemed relevant… I need to create more ad groups!” and “My keywords aren’t inactive, they’re just irrelevant at this point in time”.

But, both parties will probably end up doing the same thing… (and so should you):

Go in and have a look at your [Exact Match Keywords]. If they don’t have a good CTR, check the other matches of the same keyword and examine whether you are going to have to increase your bids. Based on this, you will have to make a commercial decision

If most of your keywords have been marked as not reaching the first page, you need to create more ad groups and make your ads more relevant. However, you might also have to pay more as the rest of the advertisers around you are likely to increase their bids, thus artificially increasing CPCs.

More generally, PPC marketers now need on their tiptoes, and monitor performance very regularly as the market can now affect your performance more than ever!

Search Advertising with the new Microsoft adCenter

Akshay Sura — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:30:39 +0000

With the launch of the popular web service AdWords from Google Inc, it seemed that Google had monopolized the online advertisement management scenario on the internet. However, arch rival Microsoft was not the one to be left behind. Microsoft has recently launched the adCenter service, with similar features to those of Google AdWords and have bounced right back into competition.

The Microsoft adCenter service allows business organizations to manage all their online advertisements as well as their content, form one unified environment. Users can sign up for the service for just $5 and can get started. All they need to do is specify the target audience/market and specify the budget. Microsoft prefers to call this concept, “search advertising”. You need to pay only when a user clicks on your ad while surfing and cost-per-click (CPC) bids start as low as $0.5/click. The Microsoft adCenter service determines how frequently an advertisement is shown by using two similar concepts as used in Google AdWords, pay-per-click (PPC) and click through rate (CTR). Potential advertisers are encouraged by the service to advertise only on searches and write effective advertisements. The Microsoft adCenter allows advertisers to run their ads on specific days of the week. The advertisers also have the option to specify the time of the day during which the ad should run. This intuitive feature ensures that using the Microsoft adCenter service is not only economic but also cost-effective.

The Microsoft adCenter permits the advertisers to target their ads to a given set of demographics. When a user of a certain demographic views the ad, the bid associated with that ad is increased.

The front end provided to the advertisers by Microsoft adCenter is both UI and Web service API based. With the advent of the adCenter service from Microsoft, the Google vs. Microsoft rivalry thus continues and as a matter of fact is good for the end-users.

Competition breeds better products and services.

Which is Best? SEO, PPC, Branding, Lead Generation or Advertising

Jeffrey Smith — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:41:27 +0000

All things have their place and supplementing one in place of the other when is comes to SEO, SEM / PPC, advertising, branding or lead generation is not always the best idea. So when it comes to online marketing and implementation, which is the best for you and why?

To answer this, finding out where you are at in the game (fledgling, seasoned or just getting warmed up) and what tactics are already in play is the first step. The next step is to understand the sales cycle and the supply and demand of your audience and industry (and where your product or service fits in).

Aside from the obvious, you need to gauge the scope of the reasons why you are implementing each method (SEO, SEM / PPC, Advertising or Lead Generation) and pair those reasons with the best method to get the job done (within a reasonable budget and time line).

Not to take a chip off the old adage of time and money, but in reality, both are key motivators that have inherent bench marks for competition and successful online ventures.

If a solid return on investment (ROI) is your objective (which it should be if it is not yet) then two things you must come to grips with are (1) finding attainable and profitable strategies and (2) being to implement them in a timely fashion (or at least better than your competition) in succession to create a stable income (to use for more marketing and promotion for the next round).

Headsmacking Tip #6 – Test with Paid Search Before You Target with SEO

randfish — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:23:46 +0000

Posted by randfish

This may seem like old hat to many SEOs, but it's a tip that never fails to get an "oh yeah!" during client meetings. The concept is simple - in any given search engine optmization campaign, you are naturally going to form a list of high-traffic, (perceived) high value keywords that are an idealistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like SEOmoz, those might be the highly competitive terms like "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization," while in a field like BuddyTV's it might be "tv shows" or "tv news."

The problem is that while these keyword searches seem like no-brainers, ranking for them can take a remarkable amount of effort on both the content and link building side. To warrant that investment, you need to know, from a business perspective, that financial returns will accompany the rankings. One great way to do this is to use paid search to investigate the likely ROI of visits from those keywords. Buy the keyword traffic for a few weeks or a month and measure visitors via a segmented tracking campaign (check out this post on action tracking to learn more). If the visits that arrive via those searches convert well and produce value, you know that a serious investment is warranted. If, however, they turn out to be tire-kickers and have a low propensity to produce returns, you can re-focus on higher ROI targets.

There's just a few valuable tips to bear in mind when you're pursuing this process:

Paid search traffic can behave differently than organic traffic, so don't take the figures at 100% accuracy. Build in some room for error, and you'll create far better expectations.
When crafting your PPC campaign for test purposes, make sure to narrow to exact match so you don't accidentally measure traffic that's coming in for longer tail or modified versions of the search query. It's great to do this and measure response in a PPC campaign, but with SEO, you won't be able to naturally rank for those same variants unless you identify and target them individually.
Make sure to narrow to a geographic area, especially if your keywords contain any potential local intent or local modifiers. Otherwise, you can seriously over/under-estimate.
Keep seasonal variation/flux in mind. Use Microsoft's Keyword Forecast or Google Insights for Search to help out. Volume fluctuations usually indicate shifting intent as well, so purchasing keywords in a down period can hamper the accuracy of your forecasts.

That's it for this week's headsmacker. I've got a very personal post I worked on during my plane flight back from LA this weekend coming soon (hopefully tomorrow), and we're also launching our new blog etiquette guidelines and some explanations this week, so stay tuned!

BTW - If you somehow missed it, go back and check out Danny's brilliant post from last week on analyzing the Top 100 Blogs. It flew under the radar a bit, but is worth a thorough examination.

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Every Cloud… Search Industry Opportunities Caused By Credit Crunch

Kelvin — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:16:46 +0000

At the moment doom and gloom seems to surround the economy, whether or not search marketing budgets are going to fall remains to be seen though.

We’ve had a few clients get more pragmatic with their spend; but generally it doesn’t seem as bad as everyone feared. Though that could easily change.

But with every negative situation there comes opportunities. And in the search sphere there are few you’d be mad not to take advantage of.

Buy up failed businesses Domains

When there’s a downturn it’s inevitable a few businesses will hit the wall. In the past if your competitor went bust you might by up their stock at discount, nowadays top of an insolvency sale shopping list should be the company’s domain.

At the very least you could 301 redirect the domain to your client’s website. Eventually the link equity should transfer over and you should see a corresponding uplift in the rankings.

Alternatively you could keep the site as a going concern and differentiate the sites with slightly different marketing messages. Or maybe you could remove all commercial content and develop a semi-independent community; it would teach a lot about your clients customers and build a strong relationship.

PPC Costs Should Fall

One of the biggest problems facing the PPC management sector in the last few years has been bid inflation. If people are blindly throwing money at PPC it’s harder to create a campaign that creates great ROI while still doing good volume.

If belts tighten; then those spending more than they makes sense will either have to switch their campaigns off or become more realistic. Those who were bidding based on their margins should make more as their volume increases.

Performance Billing Will Become Even More Popular

As an agency, taking a client purely on performance billing is always a risky business, do they have a secret cachet of bought links from MFA in the casino sector which has set of a filter? Or has the marketing department promised complete freedom over the site only for the web developers to have completely different ideas?

However when you get performance billing right and you are confident in your abilities it can create great revenue for your agency. Some of our most rewarding relationships aren’t with our best known clients, it’s with businesses who know the value of a lead and are willing to reward us based on those leads.

The clear KPIs motivate our team and when the performance billing is uncapped it pleases the accounts people too!

The Adwords Quirk That Can Ruin Reports

Dan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:11:56 +0000

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is marketed as the best possible way of measuring your return on investment , you cannot question this. Where else can you see exactly where people have come from how much they paid to get there and what they done (bought something , contacted you etc). They key to establishing your ROI is with reporting.
The Google Adwords reporting tool is a huge asset to PPC management and is not bettered by any other PPC advertising programme (in my opinion). However I’ve noticed that when taking data from a scheduled report whether it be daily weekly or monthly that the date that is generated is not always factual.

Within my role a Pay per click optimisation specialist I schedule reports to compile data to let my clients know how successful their campaigns have been. After compiling these reports using the data generated from a scheduled report I noticed the following day the number of their conversions differed from what I had reported on (for the better normally).
When you schedule a report for a period of time it is generally run within 2 hours of the following day e.g. if a report template is set up to capture data for the previous month and scheduled to run on the first day of every month it is run at 01:00 on the first of every month.

How to do Negative Keyword Research (Part 2)

Eloi — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:09:50 +0000

After having explained why negative keywords are so important to a campaign, and how to do negative keyword research, this post will review how to add and optimize your negative keywords to be as precise as possible with your targeting. There are more advanced things you can do with negatives, and some ways you can research them not only based on the keyword tools’ estimations (ie average search volumes) but through the clicks you actually get on your ads:

Researching negatives through reports

The search query report was recently voted the favorite report on the PPC blog PPC Hero. The main reason for this, is that it shows you exactly what was typed into Google to trigger your broad and phrase matched keywords, but this works both ways: If you see a keyword that isn’t relevant to your campaign in this search query report, then add it to your negatives. This is a great way to cut costs as well as filter out irrelevant traffic.

Now combine this with:

Using different match types for your negatives.

This is only currently available on Google, but watch out for MSN. It is unlikely Yahoo will roll out this feature due to their archaic keyword matching system.

Say you want your ad to appear when someone searches for anything related to cars. You add “car” to your campaign as a broad match keyword, and bid accordingly. But being a car manufacturer, you don’t want your ad to appear when someone types “car theft” – for branding reasons (although in my opinion, you should have an ad saying “the most secure car 4 years in a row” for adverse branding). Simply add “car theft” as an exact-match negative keyword to your campaign, and you will appear for “safe cars” but not for “car theft”.