As much as the title is vastly overstated, these questions will at the very least help you ponder SEO in a way you hadn’t pondered before. At least that’s my theory.
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.
The guide for what bidding options to use in your PPC campaigns is the same for any other option – your marketing goals. What are you trying to accomplish with this campaign? Once you figure that out, then knowing the options available and which goals that fit well will help you more intelligently reach those goals.
Here are the bidding options and some guidance for using each:
1. Maximum CPC Bidding – If you are bidding for ROI or profit and/or want to use any of the advanced options in AdWords like Ad Scheduling or Position Preference, then you must use this option. With this, you manually control your bids down to the keyword level in order to find the best bids for ROI or profit.
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.
On-Page Optimization
A website can do just fine online without SEO. PPC, social media and other properly implemented off-line marketing efforts can really help a site succeed online with little or no SEO. But unless and until you begin to SEO your site it will always under perform, never quite reaching its fullest potential. Without SEO, you’ll always be missing out on a great deal of targeted traffic that the other avenues cannot make up for.
This week I’ve been looking at the speakers from Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. I first covered a handful of featured speakers and then moved on to the search marketers themselves. I’ve found that that many of us in the industry are good at teaching things that need to be done but often overlook those very things when it comes to our own stuff. I’m no exception, of course, as Jackie pointed out in the comments yesterday.
Monday I discussed several of the featured speakers from Search Engine Strategies and looked at their search results branding for their names and businesses. It turned out not to be as enjoyable as I had hoped as all of them have very high visibility. Not that I wanted to point out anybody’s faults, but hey, that’s kinda the fun.
Today I want to look at several of the search marketers themselves. To see how well they are branded in the search results and see if we can pinpoint any gaps. In Monday’s post I added a disclaimer that you might want to read if you feel you or someone you love is being attacked. They’re not.
Since it seems everybody does their own recaps of the sessions they attended at Search Engine Strategies, I like to take a different approach. Last year I ran a two-part series covering just a handful of the session speakers. I looked at how well each branded themselves in the search results of Google.
First of all, I hope nobody takes these as an attack. I don’t know your personal story, whether your dog died recently or if your business is two days old. This isn’t a look at anybody’s history, but rather a snapshot in time.
Readers should think of this more like a case study. See where others succeed or, in some cases, fail, at branding their name in the search results. The goal here is to help readers understand the importance of branding in the search results while also providing ideas for how they can do so themselves.
Last year I took a look at a handful of speakers from whose sessions I attended. This time I wanted to start with the list of SES’s Featured Speakers.
(Don't wait for the movie!)
E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing & Marketing Your Website Online
