Posts Tagged ‘keywords’

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.

Click here to keep learning

Pricing out SEO services can be a challenge for any business looking to invest in their online marketing efforts. It’s difficult because there is no one-size-fits-all pricing metric. It seems that, no matter where you turn, you’re comparing apples to oranges when it comes to pricing and services offered between SEO companies.

Ultimately everything comes down to hours. How many hours are involved in doing the tasks at hand?

To figure that, you have to know what’s required in order make your site successful. And, that’s the rub. When comparing quotes between SEO companies, the price is only a reflection of two things: 1) What services are going to be provided, and 2) How much does the SEO get per hour. Each service will have an estimated number of hours attached to it. Some will be one-time hours, others will be ongoing hours, some tasks will require a lot of hours, and some only a few.

Click here to keep learning

Over the past few days, I’ve been playing around with Google Instant and reading a lot about it. There is a pretty broad range of opinion, and I’ve been drawing some of my own conclusions. Will Google Instant change the face of SEO or PPC? Will it save us time searching? Will people adopt or reject it? Anybody offering opinions on these questions is merely speculating. I’ve got my own speculations, and I’ll share them here.

The questions posed above are yet to be answered, and really, only time will tell. But, since I’ve had a few clients ask my opinion, I thought I’d provide some of my thoughts here where they can be “programmed, categorized, or easily referenced.”

Click here to keep learning

Here is an absolutely delightful new little (but really huge!) feature in Google Analytics that should make anyone interested in improving their web business results smile from ear to ear.  It’s called Weighted Sort.

The problem:

Click here to keep learning

SEO can be a boring, monotonous job. But, it can also be an exciting detective trail of discovery. The hardest SEO jobs are those that are for websites that are already performing strongly and you’re trying to eek out slightly better results. The fun one’s are those that have lots of problems, which even the smallest SEO and analytic edits produce huge changes in the results.

Unfortunately, not all sites are easy to get results for regardless of how much improvement is necessary. Continuing on my theme of using traditional clichés to make SEO points, I hereby provide you with some clichés that will help you be a better SEO.

Click here to keep learning

Clichés are a funny thing. We don’t like to hear them… especially in movies, TV shows, or blog posts, but we frequently use them in everyday conversations. Clichés are a great way to make a point because the meaning of them is pretty much universally understood, even if not entirely true.

Just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean it can, or should be, disregarded. Here are some clichés that we can use to help us better understand SEO.

Click here to keep learning

If you manage a PPC account, you know that for several years now AdWords has had three match types: exact, phrase, and broad.  You also know what they mean and how your keywords are matched to search queries.  Up until a couple of years ago, broad match meant that the keywords in your phrase were matched to queries that had all of your words in any order.

Then, broad match became “expanded broad match” where Google’s algorithm was given free reign to decide if search queries were a close enough match in search intent to show your ad.  Many of the results were not even close.  Your keyword could be business cards and your ad would show on state ids and business plans.

The overwhelming advantage of broad match of course is that you get more impressions, clicks and conversions; although you most likely would have a lower conversion rate that will make you pay more for each conversion.  So for some it works and for some not so much.  The major disadvantage is that you have to spend time going through your search queries very often to weed out those that are not applicable to your business because you paid for clicks state ids and business plans.

Click here to keep learning

If you take your PPC campaigns seriously (why wouldn’t you?), you’re always testing.  Always.  It’s the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels.  One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc.

Yes, you could test them, but only by comparing metrics from different time periods (except for ads).  For example, you’d have to run ads at a certain bid price for a while, change it, and run them at the new bid price for a while.  Then, you’d have to compare the results from different time periods.  The problem? When you would compare the results, you would be likely to assume the differences in those key metrics to be the result of the changes.  But fluctuations in demand, shifts in competitor tactics, and uncontrollable circumstances (special events, etc.) can complicate things.

Click here to keep learning

In my last post, I talked about training your text to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. The first step is to make sure the content doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. In this post, I’ll provide some of the tricks you can teach your content; training it how to do all of these things by making it skim-able, scan-able and provide exits to where the visitor needs to go next.

Teaching tricks the audience likes

Click here to keep learning

Google’s Display Network has two types of targeting options.  The first, automatic placements, we’ve talked about already.  This is where you create keyword-themed ad groups and Google makes your ads eligible to appear on web pages whose content theme matches the theme of the keywords in your ad group.  Now, we’ll talk about the second – managed placements.

This type of campaign is useful for two purposes:

Click here to keep learning