Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

In my last post, I shared using a fishing metaphor to talk about stepping your PPC game up to the point where you know how to use it to build your online business for the long haul.  So, let’s start looking at some of the “tricks of the trade” to do just that.

Trick #1 – Use Keywords Correctly

A great misnomer among PPC advertisers is the belief that the foundation to success for an account is found in picking the right keywords.  While picking good keywords is important, it’s not the foundation.  The foundation is knowing how to use keywords to find search queries that you can use to attract customers to your website.  That’s right, keywords are different than search queries.  Search queries are the phrases that real users actually type into the search engines.  Remember, keywords are like nets that you throw into Search Engine Sea to find the fish (search queries) that you will then use to prepare dinner.

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Here’s what’s new in the world of paid search advertising…

Google Changes Display of Top Position Ads

Apparently, Google is going to start putting Description Line 1 of a typical PPC ad in the headline of the Top 3 ads positions as long as the line ends with a punctuation mark.  If they roll this out, it’s likely that competition for top position ads will grow and it will also affect ad copy strategies.  It is not recommended that you merge the headline and description line as there will be a dash placed between the two in the first line of the ad.

Remember, while it may get more expensive to be in the Top 3 positions if this happens, we still only bid for position if it is advantageous to our overall marketing goals.  As for ad copy, we may be more readily willing to be creative with our headlines since you could now put them in your description text and still have them show up big and blue on the page.

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One of the great things about PPC advertising is its immediacy.  You can start running ads right now and see almost instantaneous results; whether good, bad or just ok.  But, the trap that we don’t want to fall into when running our accounts is limiting our thinking just to what can be gained right now.  The fact is, PPC is a great way to help build all areas of your online business long-term.  And with the continuous expansion of features and avenues being offered in this channel today, the possibilities continue to grow.

But for this series of posts, I want to focus on keyword advertising.  I want to take you through a theoretical progression of how solid PPC search campaigns are started, developed and used to build a foundation for the long-term growth of your brand and website.

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One of the questions that I keep hearing from small business owners every year is this: How can a small business like me afford SEO/SEM? It’s a fair question coming from budget-conscious business owners. Not everybody can afford SEO. But, nobody can afford NOT to SEO.

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There’s a lot more leverage in writing and testing great ads than a lot of the activities that PPC managers can spend their time on.  For those using AdWords, testing is the answer to almost everything.  But, testing works better if you’re able to test things that matter. People get caught testing things like switching lines around or replacing colons with semicolons and they end up creating basically similar ads.

In this episode of PPC Rockstars, David and Howie explained the coined “Checkmate Method” to their listeners that focuses in on a more intense way to write and test your ads against your competition.  Here are some of the highlights…

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I’ve never really been an algorithm chaser. As an SEO, I understand the need to keep up with what’s going on with the major search engines as a prerequisite to being able to perform solid optimization strategies. However, there is a point where you start getting diminishing returns from chasing every nuance in the search engine algorithms vs. building a solid, well-optimized website that performs well for both search engines and visitors coming through search.

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SEO used to be all about getting top search engine rankings. While that is still a primary function of an SEO provider, that’s not all there is to it anymore. Or, at least… it shouldn’t be.

If you’re in the market for a (quality) SEO, you’re going to find providers that go well beyond services aimed at achieving top search engine rankings. In fact, if your SEO only knows how to throw keywords you want to rank for onto your site pages, I can tell you that you’re NOT getting your money’s worth (even if you are only paying a few hundred dollars a month).

SEO, in today’s world, is much more about online marketing than it is about manipulating a site to achieve top rankings for a few keywords. Here are some key components to a well-rounded optimization campaign:

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I recently heard about a company that was working on having their site optimized and wanted to increase those efforts. Instead of doing so, they dropped the idea due to “lack of funds” and transferred that money over to Social Media. Another company brought their PPC in-house because it was becoming too expensive to outsource. And yet another that I know of decided to have one of their minimum wage workers manage their Social Media campaign because they were already paying too much for SEO and PPC.

What do all of these companies have in common? They all want to grow, but are pulling back on their investments when they should be investing more.

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I’ve started powering through David Szetela and Joe Kerschbaum’s new PPC book called Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day and I really like this PDF they made available online to their readers.  Although it’s about classified ads, you can pull direct correlations to apply to your PPC text ads when advertising on search engines.  Really, search engine results pages (SERPs) are just like classified ads except the page is digital instead of paper.

Here are some of the highlights that I personally took away –

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The keyword phrases to use for your PPC account aren’t always obvious.  A key to great ROI and customer loyalty is to have customers think that you’re the only viable solution to their problem at a given time.  Therefore, the challenge in keyword research is not coming up with keywords.  That’s the easy part.  You just scan the website and use the product names and there you go…a keyword list.

The challenge is in exploiting markets that become successful that competitors may not have thought of.  That’s why it’s important to always be practicing keyword discovery and exploring phrases that might work well by always testing.

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