Final Lap for Week of October 17
It’s time again for Pole Position Marketing’s Final Lap! Check out some of the great stuff our team The Pit Crew read during the week of October 17.
It’s time again for Pole Position Marketing’s Final Lap! Check out some of the great stuff our team The Pit Crew read during the week of October 17.
Our team The Pit Crew has read some informative and helpful articles on Web marketing this week. Here are our picks.
Question: Is SEO a long-term process or can there be a quick fix solution?
Before all you SEOs raise your hand with the answer, lets take a minute to analyze the basis of the question for all the small business owners out there.
A lot of businesses are looking for ways to grow their companies without increasing long-term costs. They want profits, and in order to be (and remain) profitable, they have to keep expenses down to a minimum as much as possible. After all, the more you spend, the less profits you have in your pocket, right?
This is an unfortunate mindset when it comes to SEO and SEM. Instead of looking at them as an investment that will grow their businesses, owners hope that both SEO and SEM can provide quick-fix solutions that will bring an influx of new customers and soaring profits. And somehow, magically, that influx is expected to stay strong, even without any ongoing marketing efforts.
Let me repeat that: Cost is not important.
What is important is ROI (Return on Investment).
When spending any money on a marketing campaign, you should consider the following:
If you can spend the money (1), not go broke while you’re waiting for the return (2) and the result will be enough of a profit to make it worthwhile (3) then the cost of the campaign is not important.
In part one of Paid Search is Customer Service, Not Advertising, I shared a tip about your target audience. They’re lazy. We’re all lazy. Most shoppers/searchers follow what is called “The Principle of Least Effort.” Here’s an excerpt about this principle from Wikipedia…
This principle states that an information seeking client will tend to use the most convenient search method in the least exacting mode available. Information-seeking behavior stops as soon as minimally acceptable results are found.
Google Correlate: A New Way to Research Keyword Popularity and Trends
Google has created a new tool to help you correlate search trends with any other data you might want to throw in. It takes a look at your trending pattern and shows matching patterns. You enter a data series and get back a list of queries whose data series follows a similar pattern. You must remember that correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, but can likely find some great insights here into search strategy.
What I’m about to tell you will totally revolutionize your PPC campaigns and make you A LOT more money. It’s simple, but not well known and not widely practiced. Most of your competition isn’t doing it. This is why you should be. Really, I should not be telling you this. I should really keep it to myself. Maybe I’ll just write about organizing your campaigns or how you shouldn’t run search and content ads in the same campaign. Been there, done that. Shoot. Then again, it should be ok. Most of you will follow the principle anyway, so I should have nothing to worry about.
First, you’ve been duped into believing that when you place your ads on search engine results pages for your targeted keywords, you are taking part in the activity of advertising. After all, we call it “ppc advertising,” the links on the pages are called “ads” and we call the people running the campaigns “advertisers.”
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.
Chad Summerhill wrote a nice post recently about something you should be doing if you manage your own PPC account and something you should be showing your clients if you manage accounts for others – visual statistically significant ad test results by time period. Check out the “how-to” in that post.
I did this exercise and can see how important it is to look at your ad test segmented out by time period (day or week, whatever is most appropriate). The main reason for this is that if you simply report the final results of your test, you won’t tell the whole story. Most of the time, we look at the results of tests like this…
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.