Posts Tagged ‘budget’

Search engine marketing is an intense game of strategy, analysis, and patience. But, it’s also a game with multiple, sometimes even conflicting, goals. Depending on who you talk to you, some will tell you SEO is about rankings, while others will tell you it’s about conversions. It’s a classic political struggle trying to answer the question, “what will bring in the greatest profits?”

You need exposure to get the traffic that leads to new business. But, you need to be user friendly in order to convert the traffic you’re getting into new business. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

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Engaging in competitive research before and during your SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Link Building campaigns is smart business. As they say, “information is power.”

But, too much information can also cause a handicap. It’s not too difficult to be so inundated with info. that you get information overload or conflicting advice. That leads to decision paralysis. You don’t know the right course of action to take, or you can wind up using good information to make bad judgment calls.

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Check out some of the latest news and notes in the world of the PPC advertiser…

Twitter’s New Ad Platform

Although in beta and only open to VIP advertisers that are invited, Twitter has finally released their ad platform called Promoted Tweets.  The general format is that you can use tweets you’ve created or that have been retweeted by someone else as “ads” that are promoted in certain environments.  The way the ads are served are analogous to both search and contextual advertising in AdWords, where you pick keywords that are searched on to have your tweet shown or it is matched to a stream of tweets given the contextual nature that you choose in your account.  You pay on a cost per engagement which include clicks, favoriting, retweets and replies.  There is also Promoted Account where you can essentially buy followers and Promoted Trends where you are shown on hashtags.

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Last week, we talked about PPC trick #1 to building your online business for the long-term – using keywords correctly.  This week, let’s talk about another “trick of the trade” that will also help on the way to this goal.

Trick #2 – Using Campaigns Correctly

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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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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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Over the last dozen plus years, unscrupulous SEO’s have given the entire search engine optimization industry a bad rep. It seems like every few months some high profile person in the Internet world says something about how SEO is snake oil, sending ripples throughout the SEO community.

To be fair, some of the complaints about SEOs are deserved. Not for the entire SEO community, but for a small segment of “SEO providers.” Unfortunately, like sleezy lawyers, it only takes one to ruin the whole batch, perceptively.

I’m sure many readers have either heard about, or know someone who has had (or have themselves had) an extremely negative SEO experience. I talk to many business owners who are skeptical about SEO because their last SEO didn’t perform as expected, either over-promised and under-delivered, dropped out of contact, or just wasn’t doing the job as promised.

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It’s funny that we use terms like “expert” to describe an SEO. When looking for someone to help us get us top search engine rankings, we often look to see who the experts are. Last time I checked, we don’t look for “expert lawyers” or “expert doctors” or “expert plumbers”. No, we look for professionals.

However, we do often look for experts at certain subsets. Such as lawyers that are divorce experts, doctors that are cancer experts, plumbers that are… um, clog experts, and so on. So why do we look for SEO experts? Can anyone truly be an expert in all things related to SEO?

Perhaps. Just like doctors can be experts in multiple areas, lawyers can be experts in multiple fields of law, and plumbers can be experts in multiple types of… um, clogs, SEOs can be experts in several areas as well. But an expert in all of them? Hmmmm, not likely.

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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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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.

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