Search Engine Marketing Info and Strategies

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Here’s a statement that might shock some PPC managers:

If it is an appropriate time of the day for your ads to show, you never want them to be shut off because your account has hit its budget. If this is happening, you are not spending your money as wisely as you could be.

Let me say that another way: you don’t want your campaigns to hit their daily budget.

Now you’re thinking questions like…”Huh, don’t I want to spend my money to get visitors to my website? Isn’t that the point of PPC advertising?  If I don’t have a budget, how do I keep from spending too much?”  The short answer is bid less.  Let me explain the longer answer with a very general description.

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I love counter-intuitive subjects, games and the like because with some extra study you can put yourself head and shoulders above others.

This is why I make money when I play poker.  In the game of poker, the correct play is often not what an amateur player would expect.  If an amateur sits down at a table and plays with me, they typically make plays they think are right without knowing their odds and how it affects their total profit in the long run.  Most of the time I end up with their money.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Core Term Qualifiers

Optimizing your website for core terms is only part of the optimization process. The vast majority of searches are performed using longer, more specific phrases. When it comes to keyword research, these phrases are really nothing more than your core terms with key qualifiers added to them.

Using your keyword research tools you can find dozens or even hundreds of qualifiers for just about every core term. Each of these new phrases must be carefully analyzed for appropriateness for your site, whether it targets what you offer and fits with the page’s content for which that core term has been applied. Those that don’t can either be discarded or set aside for optimization to other pages.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Research Takes Time

The process of researching your keywords isn’t something that should be rushed. Each phase of the research process needs to be performed deliberately, ensuring that you take the time to find all relevant terms and discard the irrelevant. Any attempts to rush through the keyword research process will likely lead you down the wrong paths at best and at worst cause you to have to rethink your entire keyword targeting strategy.

Unfortunately the research process isn’t always linear. You can often be working on several phases of the research process at a time depending on what your focus is on at a given moment. There is a lot of overlap and moving backward and forward through the processes but care needs to be taken that you don’t skip over or leave any of the phases out.

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So, I bought a new house and have to get all new appliances.   First stop…Lowe’s.

I go in and have tons of questions.  I’m just starting to look and I don’t know any of the particulars about size, color, functionality, yada yada yada.  I was very happy with the salesman’s knowledge of the products and ability to give me all of the answers I was looking for.  Then, he tried to close me.  Of course, we all have the “one night stand” addiction.  We want everyone to buy on the first encounter.

But, I wasn’t ready for commitment.  I mean, I’m droppin’ over two grand here!!  I had to go and compare, see what the deals were, what sales were going on for President’s Day weekend, yada yada yada.

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A common mistake I seen made when reviewing PPC campaigns is the failure to match keywords with their correct landing pages.  Why does this happen?  Probably because people are taught that their ad groups need to contain keywords that have similar words in them.  What? Isn’t that right?  Well…yes…and no.

It is true to an extent; but only to the extent that each of the keywords that you are grouping as similar should be landing on the same landing page.  Ad groups should be organized not only for keywords, but also for landing pages.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Keywords are the blue-prints from which all your marketing efforts are built upon. Keyword research tools provide valuable insight into what words people are searching on the major search engines. But research tools are just the first step in a thorough and well-planned keyword research process. Great tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker or even Google’s tools don’t tell you the intent of each search, however that information can be deduced with a bit of analysis and keyword organization.

But before we get into that, let’s look at how people search so we can better understand how to segment and organize your keywords into an effective optimization campaign.

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