Companies focus a great deal of attention on two things: ROI and the bottom line. Rightfully so. When you invest thousands of dollars and perhaps hundred of hours in a something you believe will help your business grow, you want – and deserve – to see some results. So, a question we often hear is:
How much does online marketing cost?
While it’s great to know what people want, when you give them what they want, you only give them a partial solution. The want is the symptom. But, when you address the need, you are addressing the underlying problem and providing a much more holistic solution.
In Part 2 of this series, I started discussing a customers wants versus their needs. I continue this list here.
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.
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.
A while back, I was asked to participate in an over-the-phone interview that would be later broadcast online. This is one of those interviews where they ask you to provide a list of questions up front so they know what to ask. Sadly, I don’t even remember who it was or where the interview ran. But, what I do remember is my faltering missteps during the interview. Yeah, don’t pretend it’s never happened to you!
I submitted 17 questions and a few weeks later they called to do the interview. Fortunately, for me, I didn’t have to worry about any trick questions, because I wrote them. Unfortunately, for me, what seemed like an obvious answer when I wrote the questions, somehow escaped me during the interview.
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.
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.”
Once a PPC account is set up and running, a good account manager is always looking for ways to improve results to better reach the account’s marketing goals. One such way is to test different types of ad messages to gain insights into what attracts your industry’s customers to your products/services so that you can better understand and communicate with them.
Some of these message types include: Click here to keep learning
A common mistake I seen made when reviewing PPC campaigns is the failure to match keywords with their correct landing pages. Why does this happen? Probably because people are taught that their ad groups need to contain keywords that have similar words in them. What? Isn’t that right? Well…yes…and no.
It is true to an extent; but only to the extent that each of the keywords that you are grouping as similar should be landing on the same landing page. Ad groups should be organized not only for keywords, but also for landing pages.
(Don't wait for the movie!)
E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing & Marketing Your Website Online
