What I’m talking about is teaching your content how to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. Teach these tricks to your content and you’ll see a whole new level of performance on your website.

The first thing to train your content to do is not to overstay it’s welcome. Like a neighbor you enjoy having over occasionally, there comes a time when they must leave. In the same way, you can train your content to know when to stop talking and show the visitor the door to the next page or pages of your site.

Leave them wanting more… and then give them more

We often try to do either too much or too little with our content. The “old school” rules of SEO said you had to have a minimum amount of content. Is it 100 words…200 words? There is a minimum number of words you need per page, but it has nothing to do with counting. It’s the amount of content that is needed for the text to move the visitor to the next step.

There are three simple rules to training your text when it comes to the quantity of text to be used:

1) There is no magic amount. Some pages require a lot of text, but some don’t require much text at all. But, bear in mind, that all pages need some text. Text is what convinces, persuades, informs, and helps your audience decide that they want to buy from you.

2) Keep your text as brief as possible. This doesn’t mean your text has to be short, just that you don’t go for length when length is not needed or warranted.

3) Use no more words than needed to convert. Your audience isn’t just one person. It’s many people looking at many items for many purposes. Once you start looking at personas and personalities trying to target everybody on a single page can be daunting. But, you don’t have to hit everybody perfectly on a single page. Figure out what the next step is for each group, and provide that opportunity. It could be a link to an “About Us” page, a link to “Shipping Policies” or a “Buy Now” button.

The basic idea is to train your text to be minimalist while still providing ways for the reader to request an encore. They do that by clicking further into the site to get even more information, where, hopefully, that page is also trained to provide the audience what it wants as well.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

I remember this day vividly because a bunch of us guys were scouting out the hot chicks, generously helping the new batch of coeds unload and unpack. Later that afternoon, when it was only us guys within ear shot, a buddy of mine claimed, “I got dibs on the red head.” I remember thinking, “Whatever, dude!” Nonetheless, everyone knew Jon had claimed Shannon and she was hands off until he said otherwise.

It wasn’t long before Jon and Shannon started dating, and a few years later they married and are still happily married today.

You Aren’t Special If You’re Last In Line

Dibs are a great thing. It makes us feel special. Like calling “shotgun” to get the front passenger seat, dibs allows us to lay claim to something we otherwise may not have been entitled to: the last piece of pizza, the larger bed, the first shower before all the hot water is gone, and the hot red head that needs a nice, strong college man to help her move into her dorm.

Unfortunately, too many business owners let “dibs” on their website go to everyone else, except those that matter most: the target audience. All too often site design and content is developed for the boss, or the marketing team, or even the search engines. But the audience–the people who the site is supposedly intended for–get left out. They don’t get dibs, they get whatever is left over.

Does that seem right to you?

Your audience is your “A” Girl

I knew someone once who had a philosophy on his women. You could have an A-Girl, B-Girl, and C-Girl. A-Girl could in no way know about B- or C-Girl. B-Girl could know about A-Girl, but couldn’t know about C-Girl. C-Girl could know about both A- and B-Girl.

Don’t laugh, this is true.

This was obviously his way of attempting to build a playground in a minefield. I’m not sure how that worked out for him, but it will work as a good analogy here.

Your audience absolutely must be your A-Girl. Your content must be for her. Your visual presentation must be for her. Your site architecture and usability must be for her. And she doesn’t need to know about your B- and C-Girls… the search engines, or that guy that pays all the bills and has really strong opinions.

What you write, how you write, and the overall presentation you put together on your website shouldn’t be based on the boss’ opinions or what we think the search engines want. Those don’t have to be totally disregarded, but your audience, your A-Girl, comes first. She’s the one that matters. And if she catches a whiff that the site isn’t for her, she’ll be out the door and onto the next site in a matter of minutes.

Keywords are important, and as I noted a few weeks back, your content isn’t good content unless it’s optimized. This is very true, because optimizing for your audience is the same as optimizing for the search engines. The problem is when C-Girl becomes too prominent, A-Girl is sure to notice.

Building a perfect relationship

Your keywords should be present, but not obvious. They should be a part of your relationship with A-Girl, but not overbearing. If you suddenly start giving your girlfriend gifts, she may suspect you’re covering for something else. Same is true here. If you add too many keywords to your pages, they become overpowering. A-Girl isn’t dumb.

Keep your content persuasive. Just because someone knows you love them doesn’t mean you don’t ever have to tell them. Your content should tell your audience what you want them to do. Do you want them to purchase? Download? Learn more? Add to cart? Failure to have calls to action throughout your content will lead to a stagnant relationship. The audience won’t know what you want them to do next and, sooner or later, they will wander off.

Overall, you need to maintain value in your content. If you’re just adding text for the sake of B-Girl or C-Girl, A-Girl will realize that there is nothing there for her. You have to keep your audience engaged. You do this by writing content that helps them learn, grow, improve, understand, etc. A relationship that does not help each side to grow is a dying relationship. If your audience isn’t getting anything new, just the same content they found on every other site, they’ll soon grow bored with you.

Your A-Girl needs dibs. She needs to be the first priority on your website. Sure, you can build a site that pleases the higher-ups, and can write content that is optimized for search engine placement, but your audience must come first. She’s too important for anything less.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

If you are in the window cleaning business, you can easily discount many of these qualifiers. But there will also be others in there that you most certainly will want to use to optimize your site for higher search engine rankings.

The question is, how do you target all of these qualifiers on your window cleaner web page? The simple answer is: you can’t. Nor should you want to.

Whatever keyword you are researching, the mass of keyword phrase + qualifiers can make you a bit overwhelmed. How do you target so many keywords without mucking up the site? One solution is to look at your keywords from a Research, Shop, Buy lens. Separate them based on visitor intent.

The next step is to start grouping and separating your keywords based on qualifier similarity within each segment of the shopping cycle. Pouring through a list of 50+ keyword phrases, you can immediately begin to see some distinctions between qualifiers and their meanings. The goal is to group together qualifiers that are similar in meaning and/or form a logical grouping together.

In the example above, I’ve chosen three words that can quite easily be worked into the content of a single page. If you are selling cars, you can now easily target “exotic cars,” “vintage cars”, and “classic cars” all on the same page without diluting the effectiveness of your content.

As you group similar qualifiers together, be careful about placing words together that either change the meaning or negate the others. If you were to add the word “cheap” to a page where you are also using the word “quality”, you are pretty much negating the ability to sell your item or service as “quality”.

The qualifiers used in the image above could also easily apply to a jewelry site as well. However, if you provide dance lessons, you probably won’t want to use “exotic” on the same page as “classic”. That gives these keywords an entirely different meanings.

Not all keywords will have a positive or negative impact on each other. But, for the ones that could have a possible negative impact on each other, use them together as a last resort. It’s better to find phrases that have similar meanings first.

When you target phrases with similar meaning and intent, you reinforce the message on the page. Why target the word “discount” when you’re talking about the quality of your products? Let the quality speak for itself. Have another page that offers discount items where you can go after “cheap” and “sale” and all those other words that would otherwise provide additional support or value to similar qualifiers.

Using similar qualifiers together is a great way to reinforce your message without having to repeat yourself over and over. It also helps you give your page an overall unifying theme that speaks to each visitor’s particular wants and desires.

The combination of qualifiers used will vary from site to site. Some combinations will work well for one site, but not for another, as I demonstrated above. But by grouping these similar qualifiers together, you are giving yourself fodder to move up, not only in searches using those qualifiers, but also in searches using your primary phrase. You use the many, similar words to help you focus on the one word that really matters.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

Note: Recently I’ve gotten some ribbing from friends and colleagues about my exceedingly numerous multi-part posts. In order to wean myself off my favorite form of not-having-to-think-about-what-I’m-going-to-write-about-next, I’ve combined all 12 parts of this series into a single post. Enjoy!

Part 1: Guilty of Crimes No One Committed

A lot of people subscribe to the “Guilt by Association” theory in online marketing. This theory suggests that you are who you associate with. I agree there is some definite truth to this mindset, but, like a lot of things, it can also be taken to a paranoid extreme. This fear leads some people into a paralysis that ultimately hinders their online marketing efforts rather than helping them.

“Guilt by Association” extremists work hard to keep themselves squeaky clean. They tread extra carefully with who they associate with in an effort to ensure that they are never found guilty of crimes they haven’t committed. In order to stay “pure”, they avoid having online relationships with some who they believe may have broken some rule at some point that, likely, nobody even cares about.

Part 2: Google’s Guidelines Don’t Rule the Web

With Google controlling so much market share, many business owners and online marketers are scared of doing anything that might seemingly violate Google’s Guidelines. We know Google looks at both positive and negative attributes, including your associations, when developing your overall trust profile. But we often do ourselves a disservice when we let Google’s Guidelines dictate everything we do on the web – even in areas that don’t have any specific connection to Google.

There is nothing wrong with keeping a clean profile and ensuring you don’t do anything that violates the search engine guidelines. There is also nothing wrong with making sure you associate your online profile with people you know will help you and not hurt you. But there comes a point where it borders on paranoia, at best, and counter-productive, at worst.

Part 3: You Have No Control Over Who Associates with You

One of the problems with worrying too much over your online profile is that you have little to no control over who associates themselves with you. Anybody can link to you, anybody can scrape your content, anybody can share your post with their friends, and anybody can retweet you. If you’re unhappy about who’s doing any of these things, your sole recourse is to contact them, ask them to stop, and then cross your fingers.

Google (and the other search engines) know this. They knew it back when they made links a part of their algorithms. They knew it when people started scraping and duplicating your content. And they know it now in an age of RTs, Likes, Mixxes, Stumbles, and whatever else we do with content we like.

Google will not hold you responsible if someone promotes you and then goes off and violates Google’s Guidelines.

Part 4: You are Responsible for Who You Associate With

If there is one constant in the world of online promotion, social media profiles, and search engine rankings, it is that you do have some responsibility for who you choose to associate with. In the real world, it is often said that you can tell a lot about a person by the friends they have. If you’re associating with thieves, liars, spammers, and cheats, you don’t have to be a thief, liar, spammer, or a cheat to get the reputation of one (or as an enabler of one). Either way, your associations affect you.

Part 5: You Are Not Responsible for the Entire History of Who You Associate With

There is some truth, both in real life and on the web, that you can learn a lot about a person by who they associate with. But it is also true that you cannot not be held accountable for the actions of every person you’ve shaken hands with.

In the social sphere of the web, retweeting or liking someone’s single message is not an endorsement of every tweet, post, thought, or blog they ever published. Even the worst offenders do something right! Making note of the positive doesn’t suddenly hang all their negative around your neck as if you’ve endorsed it all.

Parts 6-10: yada yada yada

Part 11: Everyone’s Got Some (Negative) History

No matter how squeaky clean you want to keep your social media profile, the only way to stay squeaky clean is to not associate yourself with anyone. The only person who does not have something negative in their profile is likely the person who has no profile whatsoever.

Or you can check the complete historical profile of every person before you RT, Stumble, Like, or whatever. Of course, even with those who pass the test, what guarantees do you have that they won’t do something shady in the future? Not only do you have to check the historical profile before you connect with them, you have to keep checking back to make sure you still want to be connected with them.

Part 12: We Are All Violators

Sooner or later, whether you like it or not, you’re going to violate some guidelines somewhere, including Google’s. It’s inevitable. Which is why we can’t live and breathe by every guideline that Google puts out.

Keep in mind, those who try hard to stay violation-free are often those that violate guidelines the most. They just hide it better.

And the search engines likely know this too.

Uh… no.

That might work in politics, where saying something enough times gets people to start believing it’s true. But, not online.

People are pretty adept at sniffing out the fakes. If your readers come to your site and just see a lot of unnecessary repetition of your keywords, they are going to see right through that. Even if they don’t realize it on a conscious level, their spider-senses will kick in, and they’ll walk away just because they are not “feelin’ it”.

The issue is one of trust. Your readers may not be able to quite put their finger on it, but something will feel… off. And that’s when visitors start to run away.

Build content people trust

No Hype: A lot of people like to use hype. We see it all the time in commercials, billboards, and magazines. That’s been going on for years and people have become accustomed to it. But the web is still new, and people use it for all kinds of things like research, business, shopping and more. This has made hype far less desirable in the online sphere.

Don’t make claims that cannot be substantiated. Don’t claim to be “the best” or the “#1″ or “the ultimate” unless you can back that up with third party verification. Claiming you’re the best because you want to be doesn’t make it so. People get suspicious of such claims.

Be Genuine: Write your content as if you were talking to someone face to face. Use a conversational tone that is both helpful and free of superfluous fluff. Don’t go out of your way to tell outlandish stories or make claims that will appear too-good-to-be-true. Neither stories or verifiable claims are wrong, but how you present them is important to coming across to your readers as genuine.

No Hidden Text: Back in the old days of SEO, people used to write content and color it white on a white background to hide it from the readers. That’s a sure sign that what you have to say blows chunks! Today, you can “hide” content with CSS, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. If you’re hiding content to make it more difficult for readers to find it, that’s the wrong way. If you’re hiding content to make your page more usable, and the reader can easily find it with a simple click or mouse-over, that’s the right way.

When it comes to hidden text, intent matters. In other words, why is it hidden? Where is the content going? Why does it need to be hidden?

But, the most important question? Whether or not the text is valuable. This one matters the most. If the content is valuable, then your visitors need to be able to read it. If it’s not valuable, then it shouldn’t be on the page to begin with.

Negative Reviews: If you’ve got a product site or a blog, and people have the opportunity to write negative comments or reviews, you can’t only allow the good stuff. Nobody is going to believe that 100 of 100 reviews are positive. You lose credibility immediately.

In fact, negative reviews can help sell a product. If the reader can see all the negative things people have to say, they at least have a more well-rounded picture of what they are purchasing. They can use the negative reviews to determine that the good outweighs the bad, and they’ll be less likely to write a negative review themselves because they know what they are getting into.

If your readers cannot trust you, they won’t engage you for business or whatever else you want them to do. Your content is the first impression your visitors will have of you, so you have to make sure that you give them a good first impression rather than a jumbled mess of “keyword optimized” content. It all goes back to writing for your visitors first.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

When dealing with your online content you have to find the right keywords and the right place for them on the page. SEO 1997 was all about throwing keywords anywhere and everywhere on the page in hopes to claim those top spots on AltaVista, WebCrawler, Excite and the six other search engines you were gunning for. (Ahhh, remember the days!)

In today’s world SEO has meaning beyond getting rankings, ’cause, you know… people are gonna see that stuff. Your content has to read, not like a keyword laundry list but more like information that actually helps sell your product or services, or provide information the reader finds helpful to them.

Everybody has a job to do

Making SEO work requires the involvement of more than just a good SEO or a good copywriter. In fact, both have their role in finding and integrating keywords into the content of the page.

The SEO is largely in charge of keyword selection. It’s not the copywriter’s job to go out and do the in-depth keyword research or to be responsible for selecting the keywords that should be worked into the page.

Integrating the keywords into the content is the job of a good copywriter. The SEO hands off the keyword lists and the copywriter edits, tweaks, rewrites and adjusts the content so the optimized keywords have been worked into the content in a way that doesn’t destroy the flow or the goals of the page.

While each have their roles, there are times when the roles can overlap a bit. Many times the keywords “selected” by the SEOs won’t fit on the selected page. I always ask my copywriters to use their judgment on whether any given keyword, phrase or qualifier works on a page or not.

This is where the SEO and the copywriter need to work together. The SEO might see a way that the keyword can work that perhaps the copywriter doesn’t quite get. A little working together, some give and take and the SEO and copywriter should be able to come to an agreement whether a keyword can or should be used on a particular page.

The SEO also needs to be able to have input as to where certain keywords need to be placed on the page. Unless the copywriter understands SEO they may not get that some keywords need to be in headings, some in body content and some need to be used a bit more frequently than others. But again, the copywriter should have final say as to how those keywords are used in the content to make sure it really works.

Good content cannot be rushed

The process of selecting keywords and integrating them into content is not one to be taken lightly. This isn’t 1997! Give your team time to figure what the best keywords are and how to properly work those into the page. A good optimized page will take several hours for research and content writing and will go through a few edits.

When you allow the page to work its way through the development process you’ll get content that is search engine optimized, brings in targeted traffic, provides your visitors the information they need and helps move them through the sales process. Each keyword will have a place and be used in its place to get the visitors in the place you want them to be because they have the information they need.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

Perhaps I can come up with a better example. I recently upgraded my copy of The Princess Bride from DVD to gloriously beautiful Blu-ray. The video quality is far superior to DVD which was a considerable improvement on my old VHS copy that I owned way back when. Moving to Blu-ray was a much needed improvement over what came before it.

Tinkering that makes sense

Generally when they re-release movies on a new format they go back and remaster it from the original print. This allows them to bring the quality up to the new quality standards. I don’t know about you but watching stuff on VHS just doesn’t cut it for me anymore. As time changes so do our expectations. We no longer settle for sub-par video quality when we can get regular TV delivered in HD. Watching an improved version of The Princess Bride or Ghostbusters on Blu-ray is tinkering I can definitely get behind.

Websites work the same. As times goes by so do your visitor’s expectations. So as much as you think you’ve got the “perfect page” or your content is just the way you want it… it’s probably time to review it to make sure it’s still doing the job it’s supposed to.

More than once I’ve run across a business owner that wants their site “optimized” but was reluctant to make any changes to their website. “Just work on the stuff you can’t see.” Unfortunately, optimizing your site for search engines and visitors means you have to make changes to the visible portions of the site itself. These people often walk away disappointed.

Ensuring your site continues to meet your visitor’s needs means you need to be willing to review key areas of your content and its presentation.

The most obvious place to start is with your keywords. Whether your site has been optimized or not, reviewing keyword selection is something you need to do on a regular basis. Over time keywords people use change. I’ve seen this repeatedly over time where certain keyword phrases get searched less over time while other phrase variations become more popular.

As keyword phrases change you’ll need to review your content to ensure you’re using the more common terminology being searched. This doesn’t mean you have to change the focus of your content, just the words used in how you present it.

If it’s good for the engines…

Also look at how your content is presented on the page. One of the frustrations SEOs have is when site owners want to hide content from the visitors. Some of this is carryover from the days when SEOs were “improving” content the way George Lucas improved the Star Wars saga with Episodes I, II and III. What is more common, however is that they layout of the site is “just right” and any new necessary content just doesn’t fit. Keywords are not JarJar Binks! They do have a purpose and they can be added into the site without making you throw up a little in your mouth.

The solution many site owners come up with is to find creative ways of hiding or removing content they don’t like.

There are reasons to place content behind “hidden” layers, such as tabbed content, that improves the usability of the content on a single page. The idea of this isn’t to hide the optimized content from the visitor (only being available to the search engines) but it’s to ensure that all the necessary content is presented in a format that gives the reader easy access to the content in digestible chunks.

As soon as you start trying to hide content from your readers you begin to lose trust, not just with them but the search engines as well.

Hiding the darker side

It’s entirely understandable that people don’t want anything negative about them to appear on their own website. But when it comes to product reviews negative reviews next to positive reviews not only give you additional credibility, they give some context to the buyers.

I often want to read the negative reviews of a product I’m looking to buy just so I feel like I won’t be hit with any unexpected “problems” later on. If your customers know the downside before they buy they will be less likely to return the product due to dissatisfaction.

Avoid the hype

One thing you want to be sure to clear your content of is unnecessary and unsubstantiated hype. At the same time, anything that can be substantiated should be added and if needed, linked to the external resource that proves it. Keep your “perfect” content up to date with fresh testimonials, links to new and valuable resources, and including anything that improves the sales process.

Keeping your content genuine and current is essential to ensuring that you are able to meet your visitor’s needs as their expectations change over time. We often get satisfied when our content is “just right.” But the reality is that things change and so your content needs to change too.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

It’s not that PPC doesn’t work, it’s that the campaigns were not set up and managed properly. All too often a PPC campaign is created by the business owner but left to run with little or no management, supervision or oversight. Even a properly (or professionally) set up campaign needs constant oversight.

Proper set-up and management of your PPC campaigns is vitally important to ensure you have a profitable and high ROI PPC campaign. Without effective bid management and ongoing testing of ads and landing pages the campaign will soon be nothing more than an expensive traffic delivery method. As time passes, bid clicks will rise, positioning of ads will fall, landing pages won’t be as targeted and your cost per conversion will increase. Your PPC campaign may continue to deliver both traffic and sales, but the cost of those sales may be outside of your zone of profitability.

Most PPC campaign managers don’t truly know how much the business can afford to pay on a per-click basis. Worse, they don’t manage their overall cost per conversion being delivered. Instead, they look at the cost as a whole, and try to make sure every $100 spent in advertising brings back at least $100 plus the cost of the product or service sold. This is a break even strategy at best–and often times a losing strategy.

Finding the cost per conversion ceiling

For most businesses, the “cost” of a PPC campaign cannot be taken as a whole. Within each product and service category offered, there is a varying degree of profit that must be factored into the overall cost of the campaign. Each of these profit levels must be broken down and/or grouped together in order to ensure that the profitability and success of the campaign can be properly tracked.

When you don’t consider each product or service separately, you’ll likely end up using the profits in one area to pay for a loss in another. When every area is considered separately, you can ensure that each and every area is profitable in its own right.

To manage a PPC campaign successfully you must know your cost per conversion ceiling for each product or service group you offer. With proper tracking you can make sure that every click, regardless of how much it costs, is making–and not costing you–money.

To help you understand this we’ll work our way through a PPC campaign for a fictional company called Sexy Doodads, Inc. I’ll use round numbers in order to make this as painless as possible.

Sexy Doodads, Inc.

Sexy Doodads, Inc. manufactures and sells doodads that they manufacture themselves and also from other manufacturers. The profit margin on doodads they manufacture is greater than those they sell from other manufacturers. Their doodads come in a variety of flavors: red, blue, green, luxury, etc. The color of the doodads doesn’t effect the price much, but luxury doodads are a bit more expensive.

SexyDoodads, Inc. also provides a doodad installation/repair/warranty service. While leads come in online through the PPC account the repair service can only be sold over the phone due to customization requirements. The tools you use to manage your PPC accounts will only give you the cost of conversion to the lead, however not every lead converts to a sale. Therefore we’ll need to incorporate some offline figures in order to figure out the true cost per conversion on these. More on that later.

I’ll walk you through all of the calculations here, but first we want to separate our doodads into groups based on similarity in terms of costs and profits. For our purposes we’ll break them into these five groups, each requiring it’s own set of calculations:

Here we have two brands: X and Y. We can say that brand X is manufacturers by Sexy Doodads, Inc. and Brand Y is all other manufacturers. We could also create a Brand A, B, C, etc. one for each manufacturer if profits and price vary dramatically enough, but there is no need to do that for this example.

We also have a luxury line, both for Brands X and Y. The Luxury sell for a bit more and have better profits which is why they need their own group. Finally, we have a grouping for the Doodad repair service which isn’t a product at all. While covering all five different product groups here can make this post a bit complex to follow, I wanted to make sure you can see how small differences in sales and profit margins can make a big difference in profitability.

How much is your average sale?

If you pay close attention to your business accounting you may already know the answer to the question posed above. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t. While it may not be an important metric when looking at the profitability of your business, it is an important metric in ensuring your PPC campaigns remain profitable. This is our starting point for effective PPC campaign management.

Last year Sexy Doodads, Inc. sold:

They have also kept track of how many individual products sold within each group:

Since there are a number of options within each group the pricing also varies a small amount. You first want to figure out the average sale amount for any product or service group. For each product group simply take the total amount of income received and divide by the total number of sales. For Sexy Doodads, Inc. the average sale amount of each item per item group is as follows:

Remember, we are using round numbers here so these calculations look like something you could simply guess at. But keep in mind most companies sell similar products at different price points. There might be a difference from a few cents to several dollars. We simply created groups based on similar sales price and profit margins.

How much is your profit?

Now that we have an average sale per product, we have to factor in the actual profit margin of each product group in order to make sure our PPC campaigns are profitable. It does you no good to pay $8 to sell a product that costs $5 to manufacture . Figuring out the profit will give us the maximum cost per conversion we need in order to ensure you are making money, not losing it.

To ensure a company makes a profit they usually add a markup cost on the products they sell. Since services don’t have a “markup” in the same way products we’ll consider the markup added to the known cost of installation and repair time.

Here is the markup Sexy Doodads, Inc. adds to the cost of the products they sell:

Markup, however, is not synonymous with profit margin. It is merely the percentage that the price is increased from the cost to purchase or manufacture it yourselves in order to cover additional costs such as shipping, handling, miscellaneous expenses, and (hopefully) a profit.

Since the markup isn’t usually 100% profit on top of all other expenses, I generally adjust it down by 5-15 percentage points to try to create a best guesstimate of the profit margin for each product.

Accordingly, Sexy Doodad, Inc.’s estimated profit margins are as follows:

To figure out the profit of each product group, you need to multiply the average sale amount found earlier by estimated profit margin:

Additional Steps for Leads

PPC tracking mechanisms stop once the online “conversion” is made. This might be a sale that is completed, a form that is submitted, or even an information sheet that is downloaded. When dealing with leads, because the sale is handled offline you have to factor in some additional components to ensure you truly find your maximum cost per conversion ceiling.

The profit per sale noted above is accurate for leads only if you converted 100% of your leads. Generally that’s not the case. You have to factor in your actual conversion rate of the leads that you get.

Let’s say you close 50% of the leads that come from the PPC campaign. You have to multiply that percentage by the “profit” you get from the leads:

Maximum Cost Per Conversion

The profit figures above tell you the absolute maximum cost per conversion ceiling for each product group. This is your break even point. If you keep your cost per conversion (not cost per click!) under these amounts then you will never lose money on PPC. If your cost per conversion is higher then those figures then you are losing money. Ideally you want to find the sweet spot where you are as far under that ceiling as possible without cutting into your ability to drive traffic and sales.

One other point to make about these figures: Now that you can clearly see which product groups give you the best profits, you want to focus the majority of your PPC efforts (and spending) on those product groups. Much money is wasted in PPC by spending money on the groups that get the most clicks instead of those that get the most profit. Sometimes they are one in the same, but not always. By directing your funds to the higher profit campaigns you can make sure you get more profit for every dollar spent!

The information here is a good starting point for most businesses. The calculations provided are pretty easy to work out and will give you a strong base of reference for optimizing your PPC campaign.

But many industries in competitive fields may find it difficult to tweak their campaigns enough to get their cost per conversion under the profit figures calculated here. As much as I want to say that these figures represent your maximum cost per conversion, they don’t. There is additional data that can be factored in such as product re-purchase rates, customer faithfulness and retention, and more. Factoring in these additional components will give you a little more leeway in getting your PPC campaigns profitable while bringing in as much converting traffic as possible without going over budget.

I’ll address these additional components in the advanced version of this post which picks up where this one leaves off. The goal is to find that absolute sweet spot of profitability to ensure you get the most out of your PPC campaign.

Labs

• Fetch as Googlebot
• Malware details
• Sidewiki
• Site performance

Fetch as Googlebot

If you wanted to know what the search engines see when they visits your site you used to have to use the Lynx browser. Now you have a similar option using Webmaster tools. While not providing you access to a text-only browser, Google does give you a spider’s view of any web page of your site.

Simply add the page URL into the box and hit submit. It usually only takes a few seconds to return a result so hit the refresh button and you should see the success link provided in short order. Click that link and you’ll see the spider’s view of your page.

The header information is provided along with all the HTML the search engine indexes when it spiders your page. The drop down to the left of where you enter the URL allows you to select which spider you want to view; Web, Mobile: XHTML/WML and Mobile: cHTML. You can test each of these to make sure your site can be viewed and indexed properly on each of these, as needed.

Malware details

I can’t offer much on this section because the screenshot you see here is the only thing I’ve ever seen on any site’s I’ve dissected in Webmaster tools. I suppose that’s a good thing.

Read more information about Google’s malware details, including a screenshot of what you might see yourself.

Sidewiki

Sidewiki is brand new to Webmaster Tools Labs and allows site owners to take a bit of control over their Sidewiki area without having the Google toolbar installed. The control offered is extremely limited, allowing you to post a comment of your own or have a default comment posted by Google that stays at the top of all Sidewiki comments.

I’m not a big fan of Sidewiki and while this addition to webmaster tools is a nice way to easily provide an opening comment, it doesn’t go near far enough to help business owners stay up to date on Sidewiki comments without having to install the Google toolbar and to checking back frequently.

Site performance

This section of Google Webmaster Tools will become increasingly important with time, as search engines are beginning to factor page download speed into their algorithms. Google provides a nice graph that shows you how your page download speeds have averaged over the past several months.

Based on this information you can tell how your site compares to others, whether you’re slower or faster, and the average load time of several of your key pages.

If you scroll a bit further down the page you’ll be provided with some specific URLs with expandable details on how you can improve each page for faster load time.

Google also provides a link to their Page Speed tool which can give you additional insight and ways to speed up your site’s performance.

That’s Webmaster Tools in a nutshell. Google provides lots of good features here that you can’t get through traditional analytics software. Webmaster Tools is pretty simple and straightforward and provide you valuable insight into your site’s performance and issues that you can address to improve your rankings on Google and the other search engines.

Learn more about these sections of Google Webmaster Tools

• Part I: Setting Up a Site
• Part II: Site configuration
• Part III: Your site on the web
• Part IV: Your site on the web (continued)
• Part V: Diagnostics
• Part VI: Labs

Your Site on the Web

Google Webmaster Tools allows you to view some basic stats and data for your site. It’s not nearly as robust as Google Analytics–not even close–but it does provide some quick and easy data that you can use to assess your site and correct problem areas.

• Top search queries
• Links to your site
• Keywords
• Internal links
• Subscriber stats

Top Search Queries

This section of Google Webmaster Tools gives you information on what keywords people are using to find your site. Before discussing this in more detail I want to caution anyone from using this information incorrectly.

Just because a keyword query isn’t listed here doesn’t mean it is not a good keyword to go after. This only represents how people are currently finding you. Keywords not listed here simply mean that you’re not well optimized for those keywords and should not be interpreted as meaning they are not good keywords to optimize for.

Onto the data…

At the top you can filter the results by image, mobile, smartphone and web search results. The default setting is “all” which shows a combination of all of them. If you want to narrow it down to just web search results, select “web” and so on.

You can also filter results by country. Again, the default setting here is all countries. You might want to filter your results for your target country, or see how your your site performs from a number of other countries. If you are an American business or primarily target an American audience, you’ll want to select “United States” to ensure you’re results are filtered properly.

Finally, you can filter the results by date range. The default setting shows data from the last month but you can now change that by any date range you wish. Previously you only had a few options such as “last month,” or “last week.”

At the top you can see a graph of your site impressions and clickthroughs for the selected period of time along with the totals.

Just below that are four columns of data. From left to right you see “Query” which is the keywords used to find your site, “Impressions” which is the number of times your site appeared in a search, “Clickthrough” which is the number of times someone clicked the search result and landed on your site, and “% Clickthrough” which is your clickthrough rate for each term.

Now let’s look at the data displayed, what it means and how you can apply it to your SEO campaign.

Each of the queries is expandable to allow you to get even more detailed stats. As you can see from the image above Google will give you the position your site achieved during the selected time frame. You’ll get individual stats for the first five positions, then stats for positions 6-10 and then 2nd page, 3rd page+.

Below the ranking information you’ll see the individual pages that were ranked for the specific keyword selected. The down side here is you can’t see which pages held the any of the positions noted above.

Now, looking at the entire chart for the same keyword as above, you can see the breakdown in the additional columns.

Seeing how many impressions your site received from each “position” is nice, but this information lacks better context. Sometimes you’ll see second and third page rankings getting far more impressions than a first page ranking. This seems to defy logic until you realize that your lower rankings were likely held for a much longer period of time than the higher ranking. It would be nice to see how many days any page held a particular ranking. This would give the impressions much needed context.

The next column of clickthroughs lets you know how many times your site was clicked in each position. You can also see how many times each page was clicked as well. Sometimes these numbers match up nicely so you CAN see which page held which ranking. This chart shows a perfect example. Both the #1 ranking and the home page got 50 impressions and 28 clicks.

Finally, you can see what your click through rate is for each position and page. This simply divides the clickthroughs by the impressions (times 100) to give you a percentage.

The data on this page has changed significantly from just a few weeks ago. Previously you’d see an average position for any keywords and Google didn’t provide any specific page data whatsoever. You also only saw a impression percentage, that represented each query’s percentage of impressions in relation to all the other queries your site appeared for. This is a nice change, moving in the right direction.

With the new data provided by Google you can see which pages are ranking for any given term. Are these the pages you want to rank? Should different pages be ranking that are not? Take this data and adjust your SEO efforts accordingly.

Also, if you find you’re getting a low clickthrough rate, despite good rankings, you may need to adjust your title and descriptions. Tweaking titles and descriptions will help you get more clicks. As your clickthrough rate increases so does your visitor count!

Learn more about these sections of Google Webmaster Tools

• Part I: Setting Up a Site
• Part II: Site configuration
• Part III: Your site on the web
• Part IV: Your site on the web (continued)
• Part V: Diagnostics
• Part VI: Labs

Site Configuration

Site configuration allows you to review and adjust your basic configuration settings. You don’t have a lot of leeway here but some of the very basics are covered which allow you to adjust how Google handles your site.

Webmaster Tools gives you four primary ways to configure your website:

• Sitemaps
• Crawler access
• Sitelinks
• Change of address
• Settings

Sitemaps

If you have an .xml sitemap for your website you can submit that to Google through Webmaster Tools. Once submitted, you’ll get stats such as when it was last downloaded, how many URLs were submitted how many site URLs are in the search index.

Each time your site changes, with new pages being added or removed, you should re-create your site map and resubmit it to Google. This ensures they have the most recent version to crawl.

If you’re showing a disproportionate number of URLs not being index from those submitted, this may represent a problem with your site map or the architecture of your site. Either way, it bears looking into.

Crawler Access

This section allows you to see and edit Google’s access to your site via the robots.txt file. You can see when the robot.txt file was last downloaded by Google and what specifically it reads. Google also provides a way for you to create a new robots.txt file if you don’t have one.

Typically the robots.txt file is for telling the search engines what sections of the site you don’t want crawled and indexed but it’s good to have one even if to tell the engines they have the run of the house.

If you find specific URLs that Google is indexing that they shouldn’t you can either add that to your robots.txt file or submit that URL to Google directly through Webmaster Tools with the Remove URL link provided on this page.

The URL removal tool is only good for 90 days so if you want something permanent, use your robots.txt file. Here have the option to temporarily remove a single URL, a sub-directory of your site, your entire site, or the Google cache of a particular page.

You can also test your site against different Google Crawlers (User Agents) to make sure your site is accessible for image results, mobile results, and their AdSense and AdWords crawlers.

If, for whatever reason, your site isn’t allowing any of these crawlers access you’ll be notified here and can make changes as needed.

Sitelinks

Site links are the additional links below your primary listing that Google chooses to give some websites. Here’s what my sitelinks look like in the search results:

Webmaster Tools will let you view and make edits to your sitelinks:

Using the “block” options Google allows you to ask that a particular site link not be used and provide a reason why.

Unfortunately you can’t ask to change the text of a sitelink without first blocking it entirely, which you may not want to do for a valuable site link, even if it reads incorrectly.

Change of Address

This section is used if you are changing URLs for your site. Obviously, changing URLs is not recommended, but if you do Google provides a nice way to give them notification… along with all the proper redirects being put in place behind the scenes.

This page mostly contains information on how best to move your site to a new domain and then allows you to select the new URL (after you’ve set it up in Webmaster Tools) to tell Google that the old domain is now the new domain.

Settings

Google allows you add some basic settings for your website that helps them know how best to crawl and index your site. Here you can adjust the following:

Geographic targeting: Select which country your site is aimed for. If you have a global TLD (.com, .net, etc) you can tell Google that your site is designed for a specific country audience. If your site is global then you won’t want to change these settings at all.

If you have section of your site in different languages you can set up each unique URL section in Webmaster Tools and assign the geographic location for that portion of the site.

Preferred domain: Do you want your site accessed with or without the www. in the URL? Consistency matters and unfortunately, many sites are inconsistent with their internal linking with some links pointing to www. URLs and others not. Short of fixing all your internal links, making them consistent throughout your site, you can tell Google your preference.

Even if you have all your internal links in order, set your preferred domain to account for any incoming links from external sites that may not be set up properly.

Crawl rate: Google allows some sites to change the crawl rate – the rate in which Google spiders your site. This can help you reduce the speed at which Google indexes your pages which can free up much needed bandwidth. In some cases Google will set a custom crawl rate for you and you won’t be able to make any edits here.

Parameter handling: Dynamic sites that us an inordinate number of parameters in the URLs can use this section of the site to tell Google which parameters make a difference and which should be ignored. This help keep bogus URLs or duplicate pages out of the Google index which can improve the site crawl and pages in Google’s index.

Learn more about these sections of Google Webmaster Tools

• Part I: Setting Up a Site
• Part II: Site configuration
• Part III: Your site on the web
• Part IV: Your site on the web (continued)
• Part V: Diagnostics
• Part VI: Labs

Google Webmaster Tools is one of the tools that I really like and which can be very helpful to site owners and webmasters to figure out what problems their site has, fix potential errors, and provide Google some feedback on how our sites should be treated. For the most part, the information provided to webmasters through Webmaster Tools is stuff that Google already knows. They collect this data whenever they crawl your website. Webmaster Tools just provides a way for us to see our website through Google-tinted glasses.

Essentially, Webmaster tools provides you with a window into the soul of your website, and gives you an opportunity to make your site more search engine friendly.

This series of articles will cover setting up your site in webmaster tools and the four main sections provided to analyze and review site issues.

• Part I: Setting Up a Site
• Part II: Site configuration
• Part III: Your site on the web
• Part IV: Your site on the web (continued)
• Part V: Diagnostics
• Part VI: Labs

Setting Up a Site

To use Google’s Webmaster Tools, you first need to have a Google account. Once you have your Google account set up then simply login and go to the Webmaster Tools home page.

Here you can add as many websites as you are currently managing.

I like to add both the www. version and non-www. version of the site’s URL. This ensures that I get all the relevant stats for the site in questions, as you can often get different results between the two URLs.

Verify Ownership

Once you’ve added your site(s) you’ll be given the opportunity to verify that you are the owner/manager of that site. There are two ways to verify.

1) File Upload: Google will give you an .html file that you can upload to your root directory.

2) Meta Tag: Google will give you a meta tag that you place between the < head > < /head > tags of your home page.

Select which method you prefer, add or upload the required information, then come back to Webmaster tools and hit “verify”.

You also have the option of adding “owners” or users to the site by going back to the home page and clicking the appropriate link on the far right. Then click “Add a user” and add the Google account email address of the person you want to include.

When Google confirms that the information is in place you’re all set. You’ll want to keep that file or meta tag in place because Google will occasionally go back to re-verify it’s still there. If it’s not then you lose your access to this website in Webmaster Tools. Not to worry, though, you can get access by re-uploading the data again.

Dashboard

When you click into your site from the Webmaster Tools home page you’re taken to that site’s dashboard. From here you can get a quick overview of your site stats, yada yada, yada. You need to click on the navigation on the left (or the “more” links) to get to the full details.

We’ll go into each of these areas over the next five posts in this series. But for now, get your site set up and start browsing around.

Learn more about these sections of Google Webmaster Tools

• Part I: Setting Up a Site
• Part II: Site configuration
• Part III: Your site on the web
• Part IV: Your site on the web (continued)
• Part V: Diagnostics
• Part VI: Labs

Quick process can often be done in a matter of hours for the entire site, while the best process can take days, months, or even years to get through it.

Do SEO Fast

You can’t start the SEO process until you know what keywords you are going to target. Fortunately, you don’t have to complete the entire keyword research process to get through this fast stage.

I’m told it’s impossible.

Ridiculous!

Scandalous!

In SEO school* we are taught that you can’t optimize a single web page for more than two or maybe three keywords at a time. Many say you can’t truly be effective optimizing for more than one. It just doesn’t work!

But what if there was a way that it could work? What if you could successfully optimize a single web page for 15 or more keyword phrases at a time and get rankings for all of them? What would that kind of information be worth to you?

Building Links

There are a lot of different approaches to building links. The different types of links discussed in the previous post in this series can gain you links in various degrees of goodness. But like most things, quick-fix solutions rarely ever provide excellent long-term value. That’s not to say quick fix solutions aren’t sometimes needed or warranted, but they rarely make a good long-term investment.

A link only has a certain amount of value, much like the value of a casual acquaintance. But like a true friendship, a link relationship goes much further and has a lot more potential.

The concept of building links is best when it’s focused on building relationships. You’ve heard it said, “give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.” In the same way, build a link and you get a link. Build a relationship and you get a lifetime of links.

Links come in all different shapes and sizes. Some good, some bad, some are just there. In part 14 of this series we looked at the anatomy of a link, analyzing the different elements that make a link what it is. There are a lot of things to consider when looking at the value of the link, many of which lie in the the value of the page or website doing the liking. But here we’ll look at a slightly different value of link, in how it’s linked between the two sites.

There are three basic ways of linking between sites, One-way, reciprocal and multi-way. We’ll take a look at these, their values and whether its a type of linking you should be engaged in.

Reciprocal Links

A reciprocal link, in simplest terms, is a link from Site A to site B and a link back from Site B to Site A. Many have written reciprocal links off as being completely irrelevant but that’s far too simplistic. There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links in an of themselves. Its all in the execution.

Link Analysis Progression

I said in my last post that each link is essentially a vote for the page that’s being linked to. That, essentially, was the original link analysis factors. Things have come a long way since then. Today’s link analysis factors are far more complex.

Over the years what gets analyzed as part of the link has changed in order to provide better search results to web users.

Links

Most SEOs have a love/hate relationship with links. We love a good link but we hate what it takes to get them. At best, link building is time consuming and tedious. At worst it’s the thing drives good SEOs to the dark side of black hat magic. It’s the one thing that most SEOs don’t to do and very few actually can do well. Show me a link builder that advertises they can get 100 PR4+ one-way links and I’ll show you 100 barely readable blog posts on 100 barely read blogs.

I’m not bitter (maybe just a little) but I just haven’t found a quality link builder that isn’t out of my most of my clients’ price range. I think this is the case with many SEOs, which is why most of the affordable link builders deliver what they can for the price, which is whey the link quality tends to be sub-par. As for the link builder’s who’s rates are unaffordable… well, you can’t afford NOT to use them. See? Love/hate.

Headings

The first place to begin in writing your content is to create a great heading for each page. In the last post I discussed grabbing the visitor’s attention. This is one of the primary jobs of page headings.

The heading is different from the page title tag. Where the title tag is displayed in the search results the heading is viewed on the page itself. Sometimes you want the heading and the title to be the same, other times you don’t. The title MUST use keywords in it. The heading SHOULD use keywords in it. It all depends on the hook you want to use to grab attention and entice your visitor to keep reading.

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.

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.

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.

Common Architectural Problems

In order to move your site up in the search engine rankings you have to get your optimized content to the search engines in the most streamlined way possible. There are some common problems that often stand in the way of that. These problems may not keep the search engines from finding and indexing and even ranking your content, however they can greatly effect the performance of that content in terms of how well it ranks in the search results.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

When developing a website, you can save yourself a lot of problems down the road by planning ahead before moving full speed into the site development process. One of the first site architectural issues to consider is how your URLs will read. This is especially important for e-commerce websites that quite often have long complicated URLs. But having good URL structure is still no less important for static websites.

Here are a few things you can do to give yourself search engine friendly URLs: